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Trevor I. Lasn

Building skillcraft.ai and blamesteve.lol

Original work is now an endangered species

When everything looks the same, being different becomes valuable again

I’ve been noticing something lately. Everything online is starting to look and sound identical.

Open Twitter, LinkedIn, or any blog platform. Scroll for five minutes. You’ll see the same articles rewritten 50 different ways. Headlines like: morning routines of successful people, is coding dead in the age of AI, top programming languages to learn this year, how to stop procrastinating once and for all, ChatGPT will revolutionize everything, side hustles you can start today.

It’s all LLM-generated content. Not terrible. Just… empty. Taking existing knowledge and rephrasing it into slightly different words. No new insights. No personal experiences. No real learning.

Look at new apps launching on Product Hunt. They all look identical.

Same gradient backgrounds. Same rounded corners. Same “modern” aesthetic. Same CRUD operations wrapped in different terminology. It’s like everyone asked ChatGPT to “make a SaaS app” and shipped the first result.

“vibe-coded apps” - they have the vibe of an app, but no soul. Built in a weekend using the same Tailwind templates, the same component libraries, the same boilerplate code.

They work. They’re functional. But they’re forgettable.

It’s not that people stopped being creative. It’s that the barrier to creating content and apps dropped to zero, so the internet got flooded with the easiest possible output.

Why spend weeks researching and writing something original when you can prompt an LLM to write something “good enough” in 30 seconds?

Why spend time designing unique interfaces when you can copy a template and ship in a day?

The problem isn’t the tools. The tools are amazing. The problem is we stopped using them to amplify our unique ideas and started using them to replace having ideas altogether.


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This article was originally published on https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/original-work-is-now-an-endangered-species. It was written by a human and polished using grammar tools for clarity.