Surviving a slopstorm: where do humans fit in the future of written content?

Starting out as a William Hill cashier in 2008 after uni, iGaming content writer Dominic Field believes he “had the best time” in the industry.

Over the next 13 years, he climbed the career ladder, eventually managing and launching sportsbooks. Working across three continents and learning the sector firsthand, those days were exciting to say the least, though not without surprises – including being arrested in Nairobi due to a police blunder and having to bribe his way out.

In 2021, Field decided to go freelance to “travel more and just enjoy life”. No more boardroom meetings, CEOs or fixed working hours, he had finally become his own boss. With a wealth of industry contacts built up over the years and a natural flair for writing, Field slipped into gig work easily.

Then just a year later in November 2022, came the nemesis of Field and many other writers: ChatGPT. This was followed by a cut-throat race between AI companies, as LLM models mushroomed and opened a Pandora’s box online. Suddenly, everyone knew how to “write” quickly and mass-produce content.

The impact on mainstream media was dire, with more than 3,000 journalism job cuts across the US and UK in 2025, while publishing giants like Business Insider pivoted to “harness AI”. But for iGaming affiliates catering to distinct demographics, how has AI challenged human-written content, and what value will the niche still hold going forward?

Pre-AI nostalgia

Having been in iGaming for nearly 15 years, GameTime Digital CMO Alex Windsor has some nostalgia to vent.

“Before AI, everything was slower and more expensive. Content had to be manually researched and written. AI changed the game by making content production much cheaper,” Windsor recalls. “Has it made content quality better? I think it has dropped because a lot of what’s on the Internet now is just regurgitated AI nonsense.”

Daniel Hansson Sokcic, who founded Bigwinboard.com in 2016, agrees with Windsor and says the pre-AI affiliate space was certainly messier and plagued by thin SEO content, generic casino reviews and copied bonus tables just like today, but sites were invested with more personality and human expertise.

“You now see endless articles that sound polished but say almost nothing. They repeat the same phrases like ‘immersive experience’, ‘exciting features’, ‘generous bonuses’ and ‘seamless gameplay’. The problem is not AI itself. The problem is using AI to mass-produce content without real knowledge, testing, opinion or editorial standards,” Sokcic says.

For Field, more concerning is the job market’s shrinkage. AI hasn’t changed the nature of his work, but he’s seen a slump in iGaming content clients. As companies double down on AI, writers take the brunt. Field reveals that the controversial ClickOut Media – one of the biggest employers of gambling writers – cut 85% of its content team by December 2025 following a series of AI experiments. Similarly, Gambling.com Group announced a 25% layoff in its AI-led restructuring programme.

But it’s still far from the end of the world. Having been in the gig for years, Field continues to have a steady stream of work. He puts his faith in the “polarising effect” AI seems to have on the industry.

“Clients either want to pay peanuts, with the attitude of ‘ChatGPT exists, why would I pay that much?’ or they’re pushing back against AI slop completely and want to pay top whack for high-quality, human content,” he says. In the long term, he expects inexperienced writers to be swept away by AI, but the best ones will always find work.

Does Google care? 

Of course, no court is complete without a judge. Field points that Google is the determining factor in whether human writers become extinct. While on the paper, Google says it doesn’t ban AI usage and rewards content “however it is produced”, the SERPs tell a different story. Research shows that human written content is eight times more likely to rank for the top position than its AI counterpart. 

Sei Kato, market growth SEO specialist at ICS-digital, says 100% AI content is unlikely to outflank human-written content backed by industry knowledge and personality, while the agency’s marketing director Martin Calvert adds that auspiciously, he hasn’t seen “great examples of AI content displacing deserving human content”.

“We’ve certainly witnessed affiliates who have been impacted by broad core updates hit a level of panic and ramp up huge quantities of AI content with no success,” Calvert says. “The further brands get from having an identifiable reason to exist that maps to what customers are looking for, the more SEO will be seen as mysterious and challenging.”

In terms of the impact of generative search, Windsor stresses that Google triggers AI answers far less frequently for “your money or your life” topics – including iGaming – than other niches. However, since AI came along, he observes that many smaller affiliates have disappeared, and there are fewer unique websites across SERPs. So while it is easier to launch and scale a site now, getting it to rank is a different story.

“That is probably for a lot of reasons,” Windsor speculates. “Google is cutting down crawl budgets, so they don’t crawl as many pages anymore. They crawl less deeply into websites too, and they seem to have stricter limits on how much data they’ll process from a page.”

A middle ground?

Another pressing question is whether players care. In the doomscrolling age when most seem happy frittering their time away on short-form videos, Field feels frustrated that “people don’t read like they used to, and attention spans are definitely shortening”. In iGaming especially, many players won’t go beyond the bonus information on a casino review page.

Nevertheless, no matter how advanced AI eventually becomes, it cannot replace the human experience of playing in an online casino. Sokcic believes there are still serious readers out there.

“You can describe mechanics with AI, but judging whether a game feels recycled, balanced, frustrating, exciting or genuinely original still benefits massively from a human who actually understands the product,” Sokcic says. “Serious players want to know how the game actually plays, whether the bonus is dead, whether the volatility is brutal, and whether the max win potential is realistic or just marketing.”

An approach that has worked for many is combining AI’s speedy response with human expertise, although Calvert notes that “the time and cost savings get smaller the higher the competition”.

“If you’re trying to win in SEO against hugely well-funded mainstream brands, in a SERP with Wikipedia and mainstream media sites ranking, AI can help identify gaps and potential opportunities to capitalise on,” he says. “But in challenging SERPs and for hyper-competitive clusters of keywords, I think you need to know what you’re trying to achieve, the underlying customer intent and what customers might want that isn’t evident on competitor pages”.

The same goes for the regulatory side. While AI can be helpful in checking that content matches local regulations, Calvert says there’s always a caveat of breaking local rules without the guiding hands of human experts, and “this risk only gets greater at scale”.

For data-driven and time-sensitive sports betting content, though, Sokcic says AI might present a more sensible use case, helping writers pull together information like stats summaries, odds movements and betting angles quickly. “But it also becomes outdated very quickly and can be dangerous if it invents facts,” he warns. “AI is useful as an assistant; the core judgement should still come from a human.”

The hype will fade

What’s been discussed almost as much as AI itself is the eventual burst of its bubble. Field compares AI’s current state to “the early days of the internet when everyone had to have a website, without really knowing why”.

“Obviously, that bubble eventually burst, yet the internet remains a massive part of our day-to-day lives,” he says. While AI isn’t going anywhere, Field expects the hype and novelty to fade. For iGaming content, this means many companies will “likely end up with a senior writer and editor managing a greatly reduced team, with AI doing the bulk of the research, producing briefs and assisting one or two humans”.

While Windsor says AI isn’t killing affiliates and is instead raising the bar for everyone, he’s concerned about the recent writer layoffs in the sector, noting that many sites that have gone all-in on AI content only seem to tank afterwards.

“I’d like to go back to a time when content was genuinely written from a real player’s or user’s perspective,” he says. “But ultimately, the fundamentals won’t change. The winners will still be product-led affiliates and brands creating content with real expertise and doing something different instead of just building another cookie-cutter site.”

Advising iGaming writers, Windsor’s best tips are focusing on a niche and building up a personal brand, which means challenging existing content structure and developing unique review styles and angles. Confident that high-paying, anti-AI clients are always out there, Field suggests fellow writers stick to their guns and sharpen their writing skills; learning SEO and graphic design can be helpful to source work from clients with extra demands too. 

Taking pride in his profession, Field has a strict AI usage policy and wouldn’t use LLMs outside of research and summarising T&Cs, which are always fact-checked later. He’s not a fan of writing tools like Grammarly either and says they only encourage “bland, charmless slop”. 

“I want to write and edit my own work. Never mind the morality of telling a client you did the work when you didn’t – I enjoy it, and that’s my skillset,” Field explains.

“Maybe this opinion makes me a snob, or maybe people need to ask themselves some tough questions as we move deeper into the AI era: If you can’t just get it right without needing an AI second opinion, are you really as good a writer as you claim to be?”