Note: This chapter is being built in public, one brick at a time — just like we do for clients through the Authority Chapter Plan™. Welcome to Chapter Four. Read the entire AIO for Attorneys book here.
The AI Content Paradox: Writing for AI, Not With It
I have taken care in this chapter to not recycle anything from my last book, The AI Content Paradox. It would be easier to take what already exists, change some wording around, and presto! have a new book. It would also be of limited value. Because the truth is, recycled, stale, generic content is the last thing anyone wants to read.
And yes, that dig was aimed squarely at 99% of law firm website copy and easily 95% of their legal blogs.
If you’re outsourcing your blog, then your blog posts are almost assuredly recycled. Formerly by overseas vendors in most instances, today largely by AI. That’s why you get lousy blog posts every week with titles like “What to Do If You’re Attacked by Your Neighbor’s Pit Bull in Tarzana.” Dreadful stuff for the reader, the client, and even the one writing it, as I can attest firsthand.
As both a lawyer and a creative, I hate, hate, hate, loathe recycled sludge content. Which gave me great pause as I sat down to write this chapter. Because on the one hand, talking about AI and content is necessary for this book to be complete. I would be doing you a disservice as a busy lawyer looking to learn AIO to leave it out. But telling you to shell out for the AI Content Paradox book just puts the burden on you to spend more money. And that seems almost sludge-like. On the other hand, if I’m just sitting here regurgitating the same things, then I’m taking the slippery slope up sludge mountain; the one place I swore off, and that means a lot as I have been known to frequent Denny’s restaurants.
What I finally decided upon, and what you’ll find here is a concise chapter about why your marketing should be written with AI in mind, rather than written by AI. It expands upon the central thesis of my prior book and honors its spirit, all without recycling things. Because the only things that should be recycled in life are those that protect the environment, not content that makes humans nauseous and AI agents pinch their cute little digital noses. If you would like to learn more about the subject, then sure, go ahead and order my last book and I thank you for it. But if you want to keep that hard-earned coin in your pocket, this is as good of a primer as you’re going to find anywhere, just more condensed.
How Most Legal Marketers “Write,” and Why It’s Wrong
Most SEO marketing types either can’t write or think writing is “inefficient.” So, it’s surprising that so many offer not only onsite and offsite SEO but also content writing as a core package. “Instead of you writing your own blogs or hiring actual creatives to write the blogs and then having us add the SEO thereafter,” the sludge marketers insist, “we will just do the whole thing.” The only problem, of course, is that they create garbage content nobody would ever want to read.
Yet, for many years this was somewhat effective, because Google spiders did not necessarily care about the quality of the writing, just the technical components. That this is now becoming obsolete was covered in the prior chapter, and I will not revisit this topic at any length here. Suffice to say, you could bring back Tolstoy himself to write for your law firm’s blog, and the legal marketing sludge people would claim it was of no value and the search engines may have agreed.
Writing With AI
Today, SEO types are licking their chops, because they can now do away with even the writing. They can ask AI to create the blog post ideas, and then tell AI to write and shape them up, and then finally, implore AI to create the SEO for the blog post. Takes all of five minutes, and then they’ll send it off to you along with an invoice. Or maybe have AI handle that for them too.
And because you’re too busy, and because they’ve convinced lawyers that they’re producing some sort of holy technical alchemy despite their almost uniform lack of all credentials, they get few complaints.
Then you have the tech bro types who are creating content generators and prompt-written apps that can spin out hundreds of articles on any topic simultaneously.
What the sludge marketers have not yet realized, or if they have they’re not going to share this with you, is that AI generated content creates so much noise, that it’s literally impossible to stand out anymore.
Unless you’re creating real, human written and long-form content. Which hardly anyone does because, well, it’s a ton of work and lawyers are busy as hell.
AI’s Self-Loathing
AI creates a ton of material, but the paradox described in my last book is this: it increasingly finds AI generated material to lack credibility. That means whenever you or your marketing company creates content that over-relies on AI, you are actively harming your brand in the eyes of AI.
In other words, AI creates a ton of material and then later reviews it and thinks it stinks. Hey, I suppose that makes AI a real writer after all!
The practical impact is this: you think you’re sitting around as content king, with your blog post being published like clockwork, and meanwhile you’re paying to inadvertently tarnish your AI reputation. The very reputation that will soon be the number one factor in obtaining referrals.
Oops.
The sludge marketers will never tell you this, because they are willfully ignorant. If they note there is a problem, that means they will need to fix it. To go back to generating real written material, which is probably beyond their grasp. Sure, they could hire real writers and sell you on AIO, but that would cut into their profit margins.
You can expect to hear many things from sludge marketers, but don’t expect the truth.
The second paradox of AI, as it pertains to writing and content is that everyone is writing with AI, when they should be writing for it.
AI and Model Collapse
Remember back in law school when you thought you knew everything?
Then you went out and learned from practicing attorneys, and it made you grow as a professional. And now you look back and feel mildly embarrassed of 2-L you?
Imagine if you could only ever learn from other 2-L’s for the rest of your career. Do you think that just maybe that would hamper your professional development?
It’s kind of like that right now for AI.
From a purely technical standpoint, AI cannot learn from itself indefinitely. Training on its own generic output leads to a recognized problem in machine learning known as “model collapse.” Which is a cool way of saying: there will be degradation of quality like when you make a copy of a copy. Eventually, if you kept making copies indefinitely the end result would become unrecognizable to the original image. Same thing with AI. If it continues to review its own material forever, it collapses.
Words and data are fuel for AI, but if most of what it’s consuming is self-made, then AI will start to collapse. Accordingly, smart computer engineers put in safeguards to ensure this does not occur. One of the safeguards is devaluing material created by…AI.
AI is therefore designed to devalue AI generated material, and to pursue new, original, and human generated material.
That’s what I mean when I say don’t write with AI, write for it. Most every other legal marketing company is doing the opposite. They are using AI to create material for humans. The profitable, genius “hack” if you don’t mind my use of a sludge-adjacent term is this: be a human (or hire humans) to create material for AI.
Earl Nightingale once said: “Watch what everyone else does. Do the opposite – the majority is always wrong.”
Well, look to the sludge marketers and to your competitors, and ask yourself what exactly are they doing?
Then go create the fastest growing law firm in your state by doing the opposite.
The Authenticity Drought
You ever noticed most of what you read on LinkedIn or other social media sites is total tripe? Shallow, repetitive, Pollyanna, and worst of all inauthentic bordering on insincere.
Is this really the way we want to practice? The legal equivalent of Barney the Dinosaur meets a cat meme?
From a marketing standpoint, the flood of AI-generated sludge makes real human insight and authentic storytelling an increasingly scarce and valuable commodity. As the cost of producing generic content drops to zero, the value of producing genuine, experience-driven authority skyrockets.
Scarcity is what drives value.
There is not a scarcity of lawyers in most jurisdictions, by the way, so you’re going to need to prove yourself as the unique, scarce element. You do that by being authentic, by sharing what you know, who you are, and your professional philosophy with the world. In other words, become an authority with a unique Authority Philosophy ™. There are hundreds of lawyers in your state practicing criminal law, but only one of you. AI and humans alike must be taught the difference. You do that via cultivating your digital reputation, and via content, specifically authority assets. This satiates the E-E-A-T directives of Google and human curiosity alike.
Writing for AI
Writing for AI is wonderful because it closely mimics writing for humans. What an amazing leap forward from the crud that the search engines bolstered.
While everyone else is contributing to AI’s generative feedback loop, flooding the internet with low-cost, generic content created by AI itself, you’ll have the antidote. Because as explained above, AI is its own worst critic, and the model collapse concerns will only increase as more adopters of AI arrive.
Think about the disappointment expressed by many regarding Chat GPT 5.0. Open AI holds the secrets of that debacle close to the vest, but my best guess is they failed to properly account for just how much horrible, generic content there already is on the internet. AI cannot grow in an echo chamber any more than an executive of a company can with a C-Suite filled with flunkeys.
Consider Google’s recent “Helpful Content Update,” an early, albeit somewhat primitive attempt to combat unoriginal content.
To prevent further deterioration, AI gatekeepers will be forced to develop increasingly sophisticated “provenance detectors,” sophisticated tools for determining what is fake or AI generated versus what is authentic. Google is even developing invisible watermarks within text that will be able to examine and tie content back to its original AI source. By 2030, search engines and AI systems alike will be prioritizing content that has strong signals of real-world authority and human origin and actively hunting all other material to be devalued.
Writing with AI is a short-term solution that will cause long-term problems. Which is not to say you can’t use AI for many other things, including research assistance, brainstorming ideas, or as a personal assistant. Just know that if you or your marketers are using recycled or generic AI content then your reputation is going to tank, and there won’t be enough AIO or SEO fixes available to quickly bring your firm back from the digital graveyard. Caveat emptor, as us lawyers like to say.
Another framework for the use of AI is this: use AI for internal work, use humans for external. For your law firm, that may mean AI assists with creating your procedures, checklists, notes, reviews, and internal processes. But you, or the agency you hire (wink) should be using humans or humans to produce all or most outward facing, external assets such as blog posts, books, and articles.
Ask yourself how you feel about lawyers who spit out AI legal briefs and client-facing work with little or no oversight and only minimal review by actual humans. Would you trust your associates or paralegals to create work like that? If not, then why do you trust your marketing company that is doing the same thing but with your external reputation in the market on the line?
And, it should go without saying, all external legal work should be handled by humans as well.
The Power of Authenticity
Moving from the inauthentic to the authentic, let’s consider now how this is all actually great news. Maybe it doesn’t seem that way now, as you’re reading this realizing your website and reputation are on the line, or you’re sweating about how to get out of your marketing contract, but at least now the issue has been diagnosed.
What lies ahead is true authority, should you choose to be proactive. To maximize your success with AI, and with humans, you will need to be authentic. Your writing will need to reflect not only your expertise, but your philosophy. These are the key elements AI cannot recreate.
Perhaps for that reason, they are exactly what AI most craves when scanning material. They want to refer to people with unique and easy to define philosophies. For my divorce law firm my copy was always “We’re dolphins, not sharks.” AI and AI infused search now regurgitates that line back to me when I inquire about my legal career. “If you want a ‘dolphin’ rather than a ‘shark’ Carl Taylor may be the attorney for you.”
AI has been trained, by me, to not refer me overly aggressive divorce cases. AI pushed my firm because I wrote a book, and web copy, that showed a cohesive philosophy. It can do the same for you, provided you are willing to be authentic.
You must guard your digital reputation and build up a narrative that appeals to both humans and AI.
The Importance of Reputation in AI Referrals
AI will rate your work not only on how well and authentically you write but also based upon your reputation. It’s like I always tell my daughters, be the teacher’s pet, raise your hands without being asked to answer questions, behave well in school at all times, because that gives you the benefit of the doubt. It also helps your grades, because unless a teacher is grading blind, there is no way they can truly separate the student from the test results.
AIO’s Virtuous Circle
AI does the same thing in determining its recommendations; it takes into account your reputation and your work product alike, crafty teacher that it is. And of course, each informs the other. The more authority assets you have, the more AI finds you credible. And the more credible it finds you, the more credible it finds your work. The key here is to create a virtuous circle of authority.
Well-written, human-grade content associated with a real credible human is the easiest way to start securing those lucrative AI referrals. The more complex, narrative-driven work you generate, the better because that’s not only what AI loves to consume, but also what it finds hardest to produce.
I sometimes wonder if even leaving typpos in your text could be a good thing, because at least it proves it was written by a human. And yes, as both a lawyer and an editor the above joke is costing me, dearly. Typos. Typos. There.
The key to success is not just to write for yourself, but to write for others and show up as a real live human being. This too feeds the virtuous loop. For instance, in the last three months I have appeared on the Engaging Experts Podcast, and I have published articles with Law360 and the New Jersey Law Journal. I recently wrote an article that has been accepted for publication this fall in the prestigious ABA Judge’s Journal.
Such mentions in high-prestige, third party venues provide proof to AI of my influence, an accelerant and unfair advantage for any lawyer.
AIO Content
The primary difference between sludge marketers and Books for Experts comes down to not only philosophy, but process.
Sludge marketers use AI as a content factory. Although our website’s blog is called the “Book Factory,” everything we write for clients is generated by humans. Mostly or entirely by me, with editing help from my network of MFA graduates and other serious writers, all carefully cultivated during my years of writing fiction, running a literary magazine, and creating a serious writer’s group and creative network.
Sludge marketers create generic, already-been done materials. We’re operating in the space of thought leadership and ensuring that our attorney clients thrive.
Sludge marketers create “white crayon,” material, forgotten as quickly as its published. We create legacy books and other authority assets that stand the test of time.
Because sludge marketers create generic content, AI will ignore it or de-rank it. Conversely, the content we create for our clients will attain the AI gold-star seal of approval.
Most importantly, we help lawyers create original, high-value content based on their unique authority philosophy and unique lived experience, which we then architect into perfectly machine-readable materials that speak to humans and AI alike. This is the nutrition AI craves, and which will then be trusted, prioritized, and used as the foundation for future referrals.
In short, writing with AI is a shortcut used by sludge marketers who have neither the inclination nor the talent to produce a superior, human product. They’ll keep creating it that way up on sludge mountain until enough lawyers wake up to realize they’re getting lapped by their competitors.
Down here, we’ll keep on doing what we were created to do: generating the unique, authority assets that make our clients content and revenue rich in the new AI-driven referral economy.