I use AI every day.
There. Confession over.
And strangely enough, I still have opinions.
I still decide what I believe. I still reject things ChatGPT gives me. I still change arguments, question facts, chase sources, rewrite sentences and occasionally tell Chatty that something sounds like it escaped from a corporate communications department.
AI helps me produce GeezerWise.
It doesn’t become GeezerWise.
That distinction is becoming rather important.
Because the internet is filling up with an extraordinary amount of AI-generated crap.
And people are understandably getting sick of it.
The mistake we’re beginning to make is assuming those two words belong permanently together…
AI = crap.
They don’t.
The Garbage Factory Has Arrived
The scale of automated internet activity is becoming difficult to comprehend.
On September 30, 2026, Cloudflare published an update with a rather remarkable finding.
More than half the web traffic reaching sites on its network is now non-human.
And over the previous year, daily requests from AI agents on Cloudflare’s network grew by more than 1,700%.
Think about that for a second.
We built an internet for people.
Now machines generate more than half the requests on one of the world’s largest web networks.
That doesn’t mean half the people on the internet are robots.
Much of that traffic is perfectly legitimate… search crawlers, security systems, AI agents and other automated services.
But automation has also made it ridiculously cheap to manufacture content.
And YouTube has been dealing with the consequences.
The platform has tightened its approach to mass-produced and repetitive material, including videos created with AI.
That’s not the same as banning AI-generated videos.
YouTube’s concern is content manufactured in bulk with little originality or meaningful value.
And the business model isn’t complicated.
Make the script.
Generate the voice.
Generate the pictures.
Upload the video.
Repeat.
Again.
Again.
Again.
If producing one piece of garbage costs almost nothing, you don’t need every piece to succeed.
You manufacture thousands and wait for the algorithms to find something people will click.
AI didn’t invent this business model.
It removed most of the labour cost.
That’s the real change.
Humans Were Making Crap Long Before ChatGPT
Anyone who remembers the internet before 2022 knows perfectly well that humans did not spend the previous 30 years producing nothing but Shakespeare.
We had clickbait.
Content farms.
Fake reviews.
Spam blogs.
Copied articles.
SEO garbage.
“YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT.”
Entire websites existed mainly to get somebody onto a page long enough to show them an advertisement.
No artificial intelligence required.
AI simply handed that business model a much bigger shovel.
And that means the problem isn’t really artificial intelligence.
The problem is garbage becoming almost free to manufacture.
That’s a different problem.
And it requires a different answer.
Buyers Are Already Figuring This Out
Here’s one of the more interesting findings.
CGTrader operates a marketplace for 3D models used by designers, game developers, filmmakers and 3D-printing enthusiasts.
Its 2026 marketplace report examined activity from June 2025 through May 2026.
AI-generated models accounted for approximately…
17.6% of uploads.
That’s roughly one out of every six models.
Sounds impressive.
Until you look at the money.
Those same AI-generated models accounted for just…
1.1% of marketplace revenue.
Roughly $1 out of every $90.
And only 2.6% of purchases.
Now, that doesn’t mean nobody wants AI-generated products.
In fact, their share of uploads and purchases has been growing.
But the numbers reveal something important.
Being able to manufacture something cheaply doesn’t automatically make it valuable.
Customers still have to want it.
And according to CGTrader’s customer research, quality remains a major obstacle for AI-generated 3D models.
That’s capitalism delivering a rather useful reminder:
Just because you can produce something doesn’t mean somebody wants to buy it.
Now We Have Another Problem
The garbage flood has created an AI smell test.
And unfortunately, humans aren’t very good at it.
Raptive commissioned research involving 3,000 American adults and found something remarkable.
When participants merely thought content was AI-generated, they rated it 48% less trustworthy… regardless of whether AI had actually created it.
Not 48% less accurate.
Not 48% more misleading.
Just 48% less trustworthy.
Because people suspected a machine was involved.
That’s where this gets dangerous for legitimate creators.
A human writes something.
A reader thinks AI wrote it.
Trust disappears.
The accusation becomes the evidence.
We’re already seeing that culture develop.
Someone reads a polished paragraph and decides it must have come from ChatGPT.
Someone spots an image that looks a little too perfect and assumes it was generated.
Sometimes they’re right.
Sometimes they’re wrong.
And sometimes the accusation says more about the person making it than the work they’re criticizing.
So yes, there’s a flood of low-quality AI content.
But we’re also building a world where perfectly legitimate human work can be dismissed because somebody thinks it “sounds AI.”
That’s not particularly clever either.
Australia Just Made an Interesting Distinction
The Australian Recording Industry Association introduced new chart eligibility rules effective August 31, 2026.
Recordings generated entirely or primarily by AI?
Not eligible.
But music created substantially by humans, with AI playing a supporting role?
Still eligible, provided it meets the other requirements.
That’s interesting because ARIA didn’t simply declare…
AI BAD. HUMANS GOOD.
It asked a better question:
Who actually created the thing?
Was the primary creative work performed by humans?
Or was the recording generated by a machine?
ARIA’s rules are specific to music, and they don’t automatically settle the argument for writing, photography or other creative work.
But the underlying principle is worth considering.
The presence of AI doesn’t tell you everything about the value of a finished product.
The human contribution matters.
And so does the quality.
Because I Am Exhibit A
I’m 74 years old.
I left school before writing Grade 12 finals.
I’ve spent my life operating equipment, selling things, building businesses, making mistakes, learning from them and occasionally discovering something useful along the way.
Now I publish regularly.
AI didn’t give me those experiences.
It didn’t give me my opinions about Canada.
It didn’t decide what pisses me off.
It doesn’t decide what deserves an article.
Usually that begins with me stumbling across something and thinking…
Hang on a bloody minute.
Then I start digging.
AI helps me research.
It helps organize the mess.
It challenges arguments.
It can turn my two-finger typing and wandering thoughts into something readable considerably faster than I could manage alone.
But there still has to be a Fred at the other end.
Otherwise you’re just asking a machine to manufacture another article because Tuesday arrived.
And THAT is the distinction I think we’re losing.
There’s another part of this worth mentioning.
AI can also be confidently wrong.
I’ve caught it making mistakes.
I’ve caught it presenting questionable claims as established facts.
And I’ve learned that having an AI assistant doesn’t relieve me of the responsibility to check what I publish.
Quite the opposite.
The easier AI makes publishing, the more important human judgment becomes.
Because my name is on the article.
Not Chatty’s.
AI Can Replace Work. Or It Can Unlock People.
There are millions of people who know things they struggle to communicate.
Engineers.
Tradespeople.
Researchers.
Entrepreneurs.
Older people with 50 years of experience and absolutely no desire to learn SEO, WordPress, video editing, graphic design and six different social-media platforms.
People with excellent ideas who aren’t excellent writers.
Until recently, communicating those ideas required either mastering another skill or hiring somebody who had.
AI changes that.
A person can bring the knowledge.
AI can help with the packaging.
That’s not necessarily replacing human intelligence.
It’s giving human intelligence a better microphone.
And for people like me, that’s bloody powerful.
Of course, AI can also be used to replace workers, undermine creative professions and flood markets with cheap imitations.
Those concerns are real.
Pretending otherwise won’t make them disappear.
But neither will pretending every person who uses AI is producing garbage.
There is a difference between using technology to express something you know and using it to manufacture something you don’t care about.
And readers deserve to know that difference.
The Valuable Thing Is Becoming the Human
Here’s where I think this eventually goes.
AI itself becomes ordinary.
Everybody has it.
Everybody can generate text.
Everybody can generate pictures.
Everybody can generate video.
Which means the ability to generate something stops being impressive.
The scarce commodity becomes something much harder to manufacture…
Judgment.
Experience.
Reputation.
Trust.
Taste.
A point of view.
A history.
An audience that knows who’s talking.
AI can generate 10,000 articles.
It cannot manufacture 74 years of Fred Ferguson.
It can imitate a writing style.
It can produce convincing arguments.
It can even create something that looks and sounds remarkably human.
But that doesn’t automatically give it the lived experience, accountability or relationship with readers that a real person develops over time.
And that’s why I don’t think the future belongs exclusively to people who refuse to use AI.
Nor do I think it belongs to people who hand everything to AI and disappear.
I think it belongs to people who learn how to make these machines useful without surrendering the thing that made their work worth reading in the first place.
The human.
That’s the part worth protecting.
And increasingly, it may be the part worth paying for.
The Recap…
The internet is filling up with AI-generated garbage.
But AI didn’t invent junk content. It made producing it ridiculously cheap.
New research shows buyers still care about quality, and people are becoming suspicious of anything they think AI created.
Here’s the part we’re missing: AI can help a human create something valuable without replacing the human behind it.
The tool isn’t the advantage. The person using it is.
The Gut-Punch…
When everybody owns the same AI tools, the tool isn’t your advantage anymore.
You are.
Sources:
Cloudflare — September 30, 2026: The Internet Has a Second Audience. Reports that more than half of traffic reaching sites on Cloudflare is automated and daily AI-agent requests grew more than 1,700% year over year.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/agentic-web/CGTrader — 2026 3D Model Market Trends: AI-generated models accounted for 17.6% of uploads, 2.6% of purchases and 1.1% of marketplace revenue during the reporting period.
https://www.cgtrader.com/discover/3d-market-trendsRaptive — The “AI Stink” Is Real, and It’s Costing Brands: Research involving 3,000 U.S. adults found that content suspected of being AI-generated was rated 48% less trustworthy, whether or not AI actually created it.
https://raptive.com/blog/the-ai-stink-is-real-and-its-costing-brands/Australian Recording Industry Association — August 25, 2026: ARIA Charts Set Eligibility Rules for Recordings Made With AI. Explains the distinction between wholly AI-generated and AI-assisted recordings.
https://www.aria.com.au/charts/news/aria-charts-set-eligibility-rules-for-recordings-made-with-aiARIA — Chart Changes FAQs: Clarifies the eligibility rules for AI-generated, AI-assisted and AI-in-production recordings.
https://www.aria.com.au/aria-chart-changes-faqs
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Months ago you wrote something like - the words you use in AI search make a difference. I use AI daily - being as specific as I can, then may add a few more precise words to compare what AI offers me. It has been a fun experience that very much helps stimulate my aging brain, definitely feeds my endless curiosity and has helped soften my skepticism. Thanks for that gift🤗. It also made me value the research you put into each article you write..it is many man hours put into each piece. On top of that you generously find the time to like, comment responses ❤️
Maybe I'll try my hand at using these tools. You make a convincing argument