Today, I opened an old app and saw a notification: it’s shutting down. Baidu is quietly killing its standalone Baijiahao app, folding it into a live-streaming tool. The accounts stay, the historical content stays, but the independent creation portal is dead.
It isn’t front-page news, but looking at it, I felt a quiet, cold dread. The stage I built my entire career on is being dismantled right beneath my feet.
Do you remember the ‘Hundred Platforms’ era? If you were on the internet in the mid-2010s, you definitely remember. Every single tech giant wanted to give you a ‘handle’—WeChat Official Accounts, Toutiao, Baijiahao, Penguin, Dayu. We were content mercenaries, writing one article and logging into seven or eight different backends just to milk a few extra drops of traffic and ad revenue.
Why did we do it? Because platforms were desperate for content. The mobile internet was exploding, and users were flooding into empty digital houses. Someone had to fill the feeds. Platforms lacked content; creators lacked traffic. It was a perfect marriage of convenience.
But AI didn’t just end the content shortage. It made content completely worthless.
The shift actually started before AI. Short video killed the 3,000-word review essay. Xiaohongshu shattered the ‘author submits, platform distributes’ logic. Suddenly, the most valuable content wasn’t a perfectly structured article. It was an ordinary person sharing raw, first-hand experience: ‘This hotel looks great in photos, but it’s insanely loud at night,’ or ‘I just interviewed at this company, and here’s exactly what they asked.’
Content morphed from ‘articles’ into ‘experiences.’ Then AIGC arrived and burned the old rulebook to the ground.
The biggest problem platforms used to have was: ‘Who will write?’ Today, that question is obsolete. With AI, one person can churn out the SEO articles, video scripts, and product descriptions that used to take a dozen people. Content factories are pumping out infinite supply.
But the real threat isn’t that AI is writing for us. It’s that AI is reading for us.
You are no longer an author. You are raw training data for a large language model.
Think about how you search for information now. You don’t open a search engine, click through ten blue links, and read. You ask ChatGPT, DeepSeek, or Claude. The AI reads, the AI synthesizes, the AI gives you the answer. The user never even opens the original source.
This is a massive efficiency win for the user, but it’s a death sentence for content platforms. Platforms used to fight to be the first stop for user information. Now, AI is stealing that front-end entirely. Platforms aren’t competing with each other anymore; they are becoming raw data feed for AI answer engines.
If you create, distribute, or fund content, you need to face this reality. Stop optimizing for feed algorithms. Stop manufacturing generic knowledge that an AI can summarize in three seconds.
The only moat left is what AI cannot commoditize: authentic, first-hand experience, distinct personality, and deep audience trust. AI can summarize knowledge, but it cannot summarize the actual night I spent in that hotel, or the actual two years I spent driving that car.
The better AI gets at writing, the more valuable real human experience becomes.
The era of ‘everyone gets a handle’ is over. The content factories are closing. The stage is being dismantled. But if you pivot away from feeding the algorithm and start building assets of genuine human trust, you won’t just survive the AI takeover—you’ll own it.
FAQ
Q: If AI can generate content instantly, what is the actual scarce resource now?
A: Authenticity. AI can summarize knowledge, but it cannot fake first-hand, real-world experience or human trust. The only irreplaceable content is the stuff you actually lived through.
Q: What does this practically mean for existing content creators?
A: Stop optimizing for feed algorithms and manufacturing generic knowledge. Pivot entirely to building direct audience relationships and sharing raw, unfiltered experiences that an AI cannot summarize into oblivion.
Q: Is AI really going to bypass content platforms completely?
A: Yes. Users already ask AI for answers instead of clicking through search results. Platforms are rapidly becoming raw data feed for large language models rather than destinations for human eyeballs.