I've started noticing something in my own browsing behavior. When I land on a blog post or article, I now spend the first few seconds trying to determine: did a person write this? Is there a mind behind these words, or is this just optimized content-shaped material generated by a machine that has no idea what it's saying?
I am not alone in this. And the implications for brands are enormous.
Dollar Shave Club's launch video cost $4,500 to produce and generated 12,000 orders in the first 48 hours. Sometimes the channel strategy IS a $4,500 YouTube video and a willingness to say 'our blades are f***ing great.'
The internet is drowning in what people are now calling "AI slop." Content that is technically competent, grammatically correct, factually adequate, and completely soulless. It reads like someone fed a prompt into a machine and published whatever came out without a human ever caring about whether it was good. Because no one did care. It wasn't made to be good. It was made to exist.
This flood of mediocre AI content is creating something I find genuinely exciting from a strategic perspective: a premium on provably human creation. Not because human-made content is inherently superior (sometimes it's not), but because humanness has become a signal of intentionality. If a person wrote it, someone cared enough to sit down and think. That caring is becoming the differentiator.
I'm already seeing this play out. Substack is booming partly because the subscription model and personal voice signal human authorship. Vinyl sales keep climbing because the format itself signals intentionality. Independent bookstores are thriving because curation by a human being with taste is a service that algorithms can't replicate.
For brands, the strategic move is clear: make your humanness visible. Not in a precious, artisanal, hand-lettered way (though that works for some). But in the specificity of your voice, the imperfection of your perspective, the willingness to say something that a machine would never risk saying.
But in the specificity of your voice, the imperfection of your perspective, the willingness to say something that a machine would never risk saying.
The irony is beautiful. We spent a decade trying to make brands feel more human. Now that machines can perfectly imitate the surface-level signals of humanness, brands need to find what's irreducibly, undeniably, messily human about them. Not warmth as a design choice. Warmth as evidence of a beating heart.
I wrote this at my kitchen table at 11 PM with Truffles asleep on my keyboard, and I'm leaving in the typos he contributed because they're proof of life. That's the whole strategy in miniature: be undeniably, specifically, imperfectly here.