AI writing tools are making clients less able to tell what good writing actually is and that’s the weirder problem

The cost conversation around AI writing tools is pretty well trodden at this point. What I keep circling back to is something slightly different.

When clients commission a lot of AIassisted or fully generated content, their reference point for what writing should feel like starts to shift. They read enough flat, competent, structurally sound copy and that becomes the baseline. Then when something with actual texture or a surprising angle lands in their inbox, it reads as indulgent or offbrief. The standard recalibrates downward without anyone deciding to do that.

This isn't about quality in the abstract. It's about what happens to the judgment of the person commissioning the work. Taste is trained by exposure, and if the exposure is mostly generative output, the taste adjusts to match.

There's a parallel in what happened to stock photography. Once it became cheap and ubiquitous, a lot of briefs stopped asking for anything specific. The availability of the format shaped what clients thought they needed.

The writing community tends to frame this as a question about jobs, which it is, but the quieter version is whether clients are losing the vocabulary to even articulate what they want from writing. When that goes, the feedback loop that helps good writers develop the work gets broken at the source.

Curious if anyone working with clients in content or comms is actually seeing this pattern, or whether I'm reading too much into a few awkward revision rounds.