Okay, seriously need to vent before my brain explodes. Is anyone else feeling like the internet is just drowning in mediocre AI content and making it impossible to compete as someone who actually tries?

I'm a freelance content creator inside a consulting company been doing this for 3 years now I pride myself on actually adding actual value by researching, finding unique angles and writing stuff that doesn't sound like a corporate robot. Lately though? It feels like fighting a losing battle. Lost two potential clients last month because they opted for someone using AI tools who could churn out 10x the content for half the price. I'm like fine whatever you get what you pay for, right? But then I see the stuff they publish and it's generic, inaccurate and its literally soulless garbage. Yet, it ranks decently because... volume? Keywords? Who the hell knows … But here's what's really messing with my head. I created a piece to a long-term client last week and I poured 15+ hours into it, really thought through the audience and modified the tone carefully every time while I was writing. Then I submitted it and he says 'Hey, could you make this sound a bit more... conversational? Maybe less formal?'

Less formal?! Like WTF!! I wasn't writing a legal brief or anything I was simply writing what I thought was engaging actually human written content and now I'm second guessing my own damn writing style. Does my human writing accidentally sound too 'structured' or 'polished' in this saturated world of AI text?

This has reached peak absurdity. I was doomscrolling through some twitter forums the other night and at least I know that I'm not alone but still this AI detectors are useless because they clearly don't get the AI generated content and also some of the content that people like me take the time and effort to right gets labelled as AI generated .... Honestly this world is starting getting fucked up because of AI. There's even people that pass their own writing through some humanizers like Hastewire or something like that, not to cheat but to make it sound more 'natural' or 'conversational' just to fit in or avoid sounding like the very AI bots they're competing against.

Using AI... to make your human writing sound... more human? To fight other AI? My head hurts.

Is anyone else dealing with this? Like the quality bar is dropping into the floor and we're getting punished for not sounding like mediocre AI? How are you even dealing with this without just giving up and becoming a prompt engineer churning out the same shitty content? Seriously losing my mind over here.