None of the content on this site has been generated by Artificial Intelligence
The subtitle isn’t quite true, because there is actually a couple of pieces that are AI-generated, but that’s done for the purpose of showing the capabilities of AI – and the lack of same.
The rest of the site’s thousands of articles are made by humans. And it will continue to be like that.
No AI-slop on GFF!
This site has existed for more than 30 years, and every word, except for the ones mentioned in the sidebar “AI on GFF", has been written, edited and entered into the publishing system by humans. A vast majority of it by me in person, because I generally oversee and edit all content on the site and have done so for decades.
AI on GFF
There is actually some AI-generated content here, because I have ventured into playing around with it on a couple of occasions with the purpose of illustrating what can be done with AI and where it fails.
While the machines generally succeeded in generating a fake podcast about the Muddler Minnow, they failed miserably in creating fly patterns from scratch – and not least drawing them.
In both cases it was pretty obvious that the AI had no idea about what it was talking about, and as impressing the results might seem at first glance, a little scrutiny would reveal major flaws.
AI is not on the horizon
I don’t want to use AI to generate content for several reasons.
- First of all, I like writing and editing, and I have no personal motivation or gain from letting a machine do the job. I don’t need to save time, I don’t have problems being creative. As a matter of fact I enjoy the work, and see no reason to let a machine do it.
- Secondly AI writing isn’t always that good. Sometimes it’s downright bad, and at other times it’s just meh ...
- Thirdly, I like the personal and sometimes slightly flawed writing that's found on this site. I get material from people all over the world whose first language isn’t English, and I sometimes just let their writing style slip through. I do use machines for raw translation of some texts, but always go through them and edit them manually afterwards. Machines know nothing about fly fishing and tying, and can really mess things up.
- AI can write, and will even offer me to make the text “professional and ready for publishing in a magazine, book or on the web", which basically means stripping out quirks and personality. I like quirks an personality, so no go there.
- And as a final and very important point: AI hallucinates! It sometimes writes things that are totally wrong and has no base in reality. It essentially combines words and phrases in a taxonomic and linguistic “legal" manner, but does fundamentally have no idea what it is writing about. So It may recommend trimming a muddler with a chainsaw or use thin steel wire for trying as the most durable thread. Both things are remotely possible, and there’s nothing wrong with writing it ... other than it’s totally bonkers and makes no sense in the real world.
Humans write GFF content
So don’t worry. The content on this site will be written by humans for a long time to come. I can’t say that it will be like that forever, because I don’t plan on keeping on that long. But for a foreseeable future, it’s going to be real anglers and tyers who supply content for the Global FlyFisher.
Half of the web is now machine generated
Unfortunately the rest of the Internet is steadily being taken over by AI and filled with AI-slop. This recent report called “More Articles Are Now Created by AI Than Humans" has the data. The researchers behind it have used various AI-detectors to to analyze thousands and thousands of random pages, and can conclude that since about mid-2022 the amount of content generated by machines has steadily grown, and in the beginning of 2025 it surpassed the amount made by humans.
That means that machines have been able to produce as much content in less than two years as humans have spent more than 30 years doing!
AI-slop
I don’t know who coined the term AI-slop, but it’s very fitting for what we’re dealing with. Like spam has become the ubiquitous term for unwanted mails, slop has become an equally ubiquitous term for the online content that’s machine generated.
It’s bland, repetitive, common and boring at best – and completely wrong and even dangerous at worst. And it’s equally useless in both cases, and rarely serves any other purpose than hosting ads and affiliate links, which pay a small, but significant, kickback to the people who post it.
If they produce enough of this useless content – and they obviously do – they can actually make quite a lot of money.
It’s all kinds of content
The people behind let the machines generate text, images, videos and compose complete web sites that’s nothing but slightly altered versions of content that already exists online.
It’s essentially based on what other sites already contains, and doesn’t bring anything new to the web.
If you are on Social Media you probably see way more than you realize, and if you search the web for products, you are very likely to bump into “the 10 best *** for 2026" style articles, which have no significant content other than superficial text and information – and a link to a web shop.
And notice how they can tell you what’s best in 2026 even though it’s the first week of January 2026, and many haven’t been updated for a long time. The year in the title signals that they are up-to-date, which they rarely are.
Fly fishing still isn’t plagued
Lucky for us, fly fishing and fly tying is a niche, and there isn’t much slop in our realm yet. But if you go to gear fishing, boating, hunting and outdoors life in general, you will start to see what’s afoot. It might not be obvious at first, but looking around for products will soon reveal sites that mainly contain trivial data and links.
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