I do not want to navigate the murky waters of a toxic internet. You don’t. No one does. Unless it leads us all back to good old bar in-person conversations.

But I do want to ride the gen-AI wave because of FOMO it might also be a quantum leap forward. I bet you do too. Except for black-hat pirates or gold-chasing mercenaries who specialize in churning out piles of steaming horsesh*t, many content creators are pivoting to elevate their game.

This means that both competition and quality expectations are skyrocketing.

And as AI adoption keeps accelerating, there are plenty of challenges to solve, feedback to collect and knowledge to build.

So where should we begin?

With great power comes great responsibility.

I stumbled upon a long-form piece soberly titled “How to build an Internet that doesn’t suck”. A radical and holistic view.

I paused again at the title. The answer might also lie in starting small and simple: building trust as the line between branded and non-branded content continues to blur.

With a cross-platform approach and highly engaging content to increase eyeballs, businesses have unprecedented pulling power, sometimes rivalling traditional media outlets.

Proper sourcing, citing, fact-checking and disclosure: big players must set similar standards in terms of quality, reliability and ethical use of AI. The stakes are even higher as scalability meets risks.

All published content should fall under the umbrella of Corporate Social Responsibility. And ours is to step up, raise the bar and raise awareness.

In business lingo, reach and conversions are great. Retention is better. A goal that is best achieved with solid, reliable, user-centric content.