My cartoon last week, "AI Written, AI Read", has already become one of my more widely shared cartoons ever -- nearly a million impressions on LinkedIn alone. Generative AI is clearly on a lot of our minds right now. "I think this is going to rewrite civilization -- Buckle up." Various forms of AI have long been riding Gartner's famous Technology Hype Cycle, hitting the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" before slipping into the "Trough of Disillusionment." Eventually, the theory goes, some form of the technology rises up the "Slope of Enlightenment" to find widespread adoption in the "Plateau of Productivity."

One piece of slang that has long embodied the short attention span Internet age is TL;DR, short for "too long; didn't read." With the explosion of generative AI tools, we're rapidly entering the age of TL;DW: "too long, didn't write." A January survey from Fishbowl found that 40% of nearly 12,000 workers have used ChatGPT or other AI tools at work. Nearly 70% said they did so without telling their managers. As Microsoft and Google accelerate the AI arms race in every communication tool, it will be interesting to see how workplace norms keep up.

Just last January, I drew a cartoon showing a couple marketers (as legless avatars) standing in a virtual world under a banner that reads, "welcome to our brand experience in the metaverse!" One is saying to the other, "I'm sure consumers will show up ANY minute now." The breathless excitement around all things Web3 --from NFTs to crypto to blockchain to the metaverse -- is quieter now. But the Generative AI hype train is full steam ahead. From startups to marketers at large CPG companies to VC, the pivot to AI is whiplash-inducing, even compared to the last few whiplash years.

Ian Whitworth recently described AI-generated content as "infinite words nobody wants." "ChatGPT is here to make us all the same… The Great Same-ening is upon us… "ChatGPT, Jasper and all the rest are powerful conformity machines, giving you the ability to churn out Bible-length material about yourself and your business that's exactly the same as your competitors." That's the path of least resistance in the AI-generated arms race -- using the same tools that everyone else has access to in the same way as everyone else. Much of what is created is already a sea of sameness, written more to appease Google's search algorithms than actual people. This is related to what P&G CMO Marc Pritchard referred to as the "content crap trap."

On May 26, 1995, Bill Gates wrote the famous "Internet Tidal Wave" internal memo at Microsoft. This was a huge wake-up call for the desktop software company at the time. It immediately shifted priorities and resources for Microsoft to go after the nascent World Wide Web. I thought of this "Internet Tidal Wave" moment when I came across a helpful analogy from Hubspot CTO Dharmesh Shah a couple weeks ago: "Netscape was to the Internet what ChatGPT is to Artificial Intelligence. "The Internet existed before Netscape.

Ad exec Dave Trott once pointed out the dictionary definition of "content" to unpack his distaste for that term in marketing: "Content (noun): everything that is inside a container; the contents of a box." "So there it is: we're in the shipping business. That's what happened to what we used to call'the idea.' The idea has become whatever goes into the box: just content. It could be anything, it's not important… "Content is seen as just stuff. The stuff that goes into the space that's there to be filled… It doesn't matter what the content is.

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Tom Fishburne is founder of Marketoon Studios. Follow his work at marketoonist.com