The Bell Curve, the Zen Garden, and Why I Still Create in the Age of AI Slop

The bell curve meme. You know the one.

Left side: "I just create with AI and ship it lol."

Middle: Stares at blank page. Overthinks the hook. Rewrites 20 times. Googles "how to go viral." Buys a prompt pack. Opens Notion. Closes Notion. Opens Notion again. Makes a content calendar. Color-codes it. Doesn't post for three weeks.

Right side: "I just create with AI and ship it lol."

Same sentence. Completely different person. And the middle is sweating through their hoodie wondering why it's not working.

I think about this every day. Because AI turned the entire content game into this meme.

Here's the uncomfortable part: AI slop is everywhere. You already know what it looks like. The LinkedIn posts that open with "I never expected this to happen..." The carousel that uses the same five fonts as every other carousel. The blog post that reads like it was written by someone who's never had a strong opinion about anything. Including lunch.

But what if some of it is actually... good?

Not the slop. The slop is gas station sushi. Technically food. Technically available. You won't remember it and it might hurt you later.

But some AI content? It's useful. Clear. Helpful. And it ships in seconds. Good enough is now free. That's the part that should scare the middle of the curve. Because while they're on draft 20, someone on the left side already posted, got feedback, and is on version 3.

So if good enough is free, what's worth paying attention to?

The weirdos. The outliers. The ones who went so far into their thing they can't come back.

MrBeast didn't follow a content playbook. He became the playbook. You can't AI-generate that.

Emma Chamberlain started on YouTube. Now she has Chamberlain Coffee. She didn't make "content about coffee." She became coffee. The creator and the brand and the product are the same ingredient. Try replicating that with a prompt.

Naval Ravikant. A VC who tweets philosophy. Shouldn't work. Works because it's him. He didn't optimize for reach. He optimized for truth. Reach followed.

Naval says being a creator is an advantage. I agree. But not for the reason everyone thinks.

The advantage isn't the content you make. It's that creating is how you learn to think. And thinking can't be copied.

I create with AI. I ship with AI. I don't sit there agonizing over whether it's "authentic enough." That's middle-of-the-curve energy. The right side of the curve uses every tool available and doesn't feel guilty about it.

But here's why I keep creating at all. Not to produce, not to hit a number. Creating is my zen garden. My little corner where I mellow and meander and figure out what I actually think about the world. Some of it becomes a post. Some of it becomes a product. Most of it becomes nothing. And that's fine. The garden isn't for you. The garden is for me.

The middle of the curve creates to produce. Posts per week. Engagement rate. Content calendar. Dashboard.

The right side creates to understand. Then shares what they understood. That's it.

This is why I built Preso. Not to make more slides. The world has enough slides. Preso exists because experts think in interesting ways and the bottleneck was never ideas. It was translation. Packaging how you think into something another human can feel in 20 minutes.

AI can generate a deck in six seconds. It can't tell you which five slides actually matter. That's still your job.

So: are you creating to produce, or creating to understand?

If it's the first one, AI already has your job. It's faster and it doesn't need coffee.

If it's the second one, welcome to the right side of the curve. It looks exactly like the left. That's the whole point.

— String

P.S. I wrote this with AI. The zen garden is mine. The AI just helped me rake.