Holly Homer built one of the biggest kids’ activity sites on the internet, and then watched the machines learn it and serve it back without her. Her account of what happened next is not the bitter one you would expect.
Replaced By My Own Words
“I was literally replaced by my own words in the search results and the AI results.”
— Holly Homer
The context makes it sting more. She is describing “fifteen thousand blog posts and my four books,” used without compensation, on a site whose content she describes as “super simple” — “you don’t need a 4,000 word blog post to understand how to make a paper plate craft of a squirrel.”
Simple, useful, factual content turned out to be exactly what a summarising machine is best at absorbing. She is honest about the aftermath: “obviously I was slightly bitter for a while about that.”
The Next Frontier Is Being Human
What is unexpected is where she landed.
“being human in a place where being human is kind of neat and special now… is really kind of I think the frontier, the next frontier”
— Holly Homer
Her reasoning is about scarcity. “Because it is so cluttered with just AI slop everywhere you go,” she says, “if there is an actual human with an actual experience that AI does not have, then the other humans are going to be attracted to that.”
She adds that the human voice “is going to stand out more and more and more” — not because it is better written, but because there is less of it.
What Machines Cannot Summarise
Homer is specific about what still requires a person: “we still are going to humans to find out what they like and how they use something and what they recommend. And how did you solve that problem?”
Notice that every item on that list is a first-person report. What you liked. How you used it. What went wrong and what you did. None of it can be produced by summarising what already exists, because it did not exist until you lived it.
She is also clear-eyed about why this now matters commercially: readers have learned to distrust the frictionless version. “There’s no product in the world that has nothing bad about it.”
Writing The Parts Only You Lived
Practitioner guidance rather than Homer’s prescription. When you sit down to write, put the specific thing first: the date, the mistake, the amount, the argument you had with yourself about it. The general advice can come after, and it will be believed because of what preceded it.
Homer’s own examples come from teaching — opening up her actual email client in a lesson, showing “here’s a sequence that I might put together,” and finding that the questions came naturally because people could see the real thing. As she puts it, at that point “it’s not even sales… it’s literally fitting people with the information that they’re searching” for.
The rule of thumb: if the paragraph would be equally true written by someone who had never done it, cut it or replace it with the part only you can tell.
More on this theme in Cecily North on why AI can’t replace human.
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