Productive Garbage

When AI creation scales faster than Human cognition

We’ve dramatically scaled our ability to create.

We can now:

• Draft reports in seconds

• Write a 20-page strategy proposal in minutes

• Build a new product in half a day

• Outline a full marketing campaign to launch it in a few prompts and clicks

The friction is mostly gone.

And with it, something else disappeared too: a natural filter.

Before, writing required real effort. Remember the days of starting any document from a blank, empty sheet?

That effort forced reflection.
And reflection forced clarity.

That natural filter helped us digest before we shared. Which is a good thing for the creator, but also for the recipient of that information.

It’s very different now.

AI has scaled content creation exponentially. But human cognition doesn’t scale.

We, as humans, still:

• Read at the same speed

• Process with the same attention

• Decide with the same mental energy and biases

• Prioritize with the same limited focus

So we’ve created a system where:

Our ability to produce information has scaled dramatically - but our ability to absorb and act on it hasn’t.

This creates a new kind of waste.

Not necessarily bad information.
Not wrong either…
I’m not sure what to call it. It’s just… too much?

And when it’s too much - too many documents at the same time, too many drafts, too many features being shipped, too many vibe-coded prototypes - that information turns into noise.

Productive garbage.

I’m calling it productive because there is a certain sense of productivity in all of this. But output doesn’t equal value.

When content becomes cheap, accountability often does too... It’s easy to share an AI-generated draft while distancing yourself from its quality or usefulness:

“It’s just a first draft from Co-pilot!”.

But once that draft is shared, someone else still pays the cost in time, attention, and mental energy.

So the system fills with:

• Well-written but generic ideas

• Long documents nobody reads

• Content without ownership and accountability

• Options without thoughtful judgment

What happens then?

What I’m seeing is that critical information now gets diluted.
Valuable features are now at risk of becoming invisible, competing with a hundred options your customers have to juggle.

Campaigns that would truly move the needle in your business now compete for attention with mediocrity.

In other words, signal gets diluted.

Not because all of this stuff lacks quality, but because the environment can become saturated.

So what’s the real problem here?

The problem is not using AI to:

• Brainstorm

• Challenge

• Draft

• Explore

• Clarify

• Iterate

• Build

That’s incredibly powerful. I love it, and I’m sure you love it too.

The breaking point is oversharing.

The creator saved time, but the receiver pays the cost.

And this is the asymmetry most people are missing.

In the Age of AI, the bottleneck is clearly no longer creation. It’s attention.

The new responsibility

Using AI responsibly (in this context) doesn’t mean generating less. It means sharing less.

AI should help you expand your thinking. Not expand everyone else’s workload and dilute signal.

Share what’s valuable, when it’s valuable, to someone who’d benefit from consuming it.

In a world where everyone can create, the most valuable people are not those who produce the most.

But those who:

• Say less

• Say it clearly

• Say it at the right time

• And remove more than they add

The paradox of AI “productivity”

AI makes us faster at creating. But speed without curation creates noise.

Noise clouds judgment. Poor judgment hurts results.

So ironically:

The more you generate without judgment and curation, the less productive you (and those around you) become.

By now, you’ve learned how to leverage AI for creating more and faster. That’s great.

The next skill is rarer, and perhaps more human: knowing what deserves to exist.