The LLM Arbitrage Opportunity
Insert ALL CAPS CLICKBAIT HEADLINE here
A significant market inefficiency is emerging right now. The "LLM tone" has become so pervasive that authentic, human writing is starting to stand out by contrast, creating genuine commercial value for those who can recognize and exploit this gap.
You've seen it:
ALL CAPS CLICKBAIT HEADLINE
It's not this. It's that.
It's not this. It's that.
This is just that. It's this.
Call to action.
Add emojis, and you're there.
The formulaic "if not this, then that" structure has become the business writing equivalent of the uncanny valley. Everyone is optimizing for engagement algorithms with the same templates: hook statements, false dichotomies, and numbered insights that sound profound but convey little. The result is a homogenized feed where authentic voice has become accidentally rare.
LLMs are trained on the scraped internet, which means they've absorbed millions of examples of content optimized for clicks rather than resonant connection. They've learned to write like marketers because most of the training data was written by marketers, comms strategists, investment brief writers, or people halfheartedly mimicking these styles.
The corporate third-person voice emerged because it sounds authoritative while saying nothing specific enough to be wrong. "Organizations should leverage..." is the perfect hedge. It applies to everyone and commits to nothing. LLMs have accelerated everyone's ability to be evasive.
The emoji thing is particularly insidious. It's emotional manipulation disguised as friendliness. The brain processes visual symbols faster than text, so the emojis create a sense of excitement before your rational mind has time to realize the content is meaningless.
Until you learn to tune it out. How many of us have now learned to quickly skim over a post using emojis because they signal that someone used an LLM to create it? Or developed a practice of unfollowing someone who repeatedly falls for this shortcut? How many are now allergic to the em dash—? Or the words "delve," "tapestry," or "game-changing"? Or the "if this/then that" form?
The Real Contribution Crisis
But this goes deeper than style. We're witnessing the commoditization of contribution itself. LLMs excel at producing content that appears to contribute to discourse while actually adding nothing new to human understanding. They recombine existing patterns into seemingly novel configurations that feel insightful but contain no genuine discovery, no authentic wrestling with problems, no embodied learning from real experience.
True contribution emerges from humans engaging with actual constraints, real stakeholders, and messy contexts that resist optimization. It requires the kind of contextual judgment that comes from having skin in the game, from making decisions with consequences, from iterating through failure in specific circumstances.
The Arbitrage
The arbitrage opportunity is straightforward: while everyone else is racing toward AI-assisted efficiency, there's growing demand for prose, strategy, and ideas that emerge from embodied life.
Here's the trade:
Buy side: Hire people who can think clearly, write authentically, and analyze complex systems without defaulting to frameworks. They're currently undervalued because they don't "scale" and their output doesn't optimize well for algorithmic distribution.
Sell side: Offer their work to organizations drowning in AI-generated noise who desperately need actual strategic thinking. These buyers are willing to pay premium rates because they can't find real insight anywhere else. Even OpenAI has started selling $ 10 million corporate contracts for their employees to embed within your organization to help you adopt their models.
The spread: The market hasn't priced in the value of human cognition when everyone else is optimizing for machine metrics. A strategist who can spot second-order effects, a writer who can cut through algorithmic noise, a researcher who understands context. They're trading at massive discounts to their utility.
The arbitrage window remains open as long as the market continues to overvalue scalable, replace-the-humans efficiency optimization promises and undervalues contextual human judgment.