Ep 107 Nobody Loses the Plot Like an Expert

Hey there, so I need to tell you about something that happened last week. I had a journalist flag a quote from one of my clients as AI generated, like 100 % AI generated according to the detector that he was using. But the problem is my client actually wrote that herself. She's like a writer, like professionally. She wrote a book. Words are one of her actual jobs.

So the quote, it got rejected and he contacted me. And it's not because the quote wasn't hers and it's not because the quote itself wasn't true at all. Not because it wasn't good either, but because a single piece of software looked at the way that she naturally constructs her sentences and decided that it didn't believe it was her. And I sat with this for a while, like all week.

Because I don't think that journalist was wrong to check either. And it is a really difficult place to be in the middle. And I don't think the detector was particularly malfunctioning either. I think we've arrived at a moment where the system might genuinely be broken and the brake is running in every direction at once. That's the problem. And that's what I want to talk about today. Because here's the thing.

that I want to say today. And I want to say it really clear. And this was a hard one on everyone, and I mean everyone. It's hard for founders and consultants who genuinely want to show up well, who polish their words because they care about being taken super seriously.

And they have spent their whole careers being told that professionalism looks a certain way. And they're not trying to fake a single thing. They're trying not to embarrass themselves. And now that instinct to clean up, to refine our words, to polish our content, and to sound credible, it's working against us now. It's hard for PR firms, for comms peeps,

any of us who are really under pressure to get content published. They're producing at volume because clients want volume today. They're using the same AI tools that everyone else is using because the alternative is hiring 10 more people that we don't have budget for. And they're trying to differentiate in a market that's drowning in undifferentiated content.

And I don't think any of them woke up one morning and decided to make more noise or to make the noise worse. I think the economics got away from them. And it's really hard for journalists and media editors who are being flooded with the content on the other side, like genuinely flooded. AI generated pitches a hundred times a day. AI generated quotes. AI generated op-eds. They read awesome, but they say,

zilch. Like, they say nothing.

they're protecting the integrity of their publications with really blunt instruments because the volume doesn't leave the room for nuance. So they reach for a detector, an AI detector tool, and the detector catches a writer. Nobody in this story is a villain, and the story is still a disaster for everyone. So here's where I'll get really direct with you, because I've thought about this a lot, and so has my client.

And I don't think the solution is what most people are reaching for. The response I see from a lot of experts and founders is write more casually, add more typos. I know you've heard that before. Sound more human in your writing, like you're writing at 2 a.m. to your friend. Like the goal is to fool the detector, like literally. If you just throw in enough imperfection, the machine will believe that you're a human.

That's not the solution. That's just performing authenticity instead of performing professionalism. Which do you want to be? You've changed your costume in that sense, but you're still wearing a mask. You're still putting the mask on.

The actual problem is that most people, most experts, most CEOs, most founders and consultants, they don't have enough of a clear sense of what their own voice is to stand on their feet and defend it. They can't point to it. They can't describe it in words. They can't say, this is how I think, this is how I write, this is what makes my sentences mine. So when something gets flagged, they have no ground to stand on.

And when they use AI, they have nothing to bring to it. Voice isn't a style. I want to be really explicit here. There's a distinction. Style is the surface, the vocabulary, the sentence length, the dashes or lack of dashes, Voice is the thing underneath that. It's the specific way you think through problems, how your brain works.

the angle you come at things from. It's the things you notice that other people in your field glance over or skip. It's the position you hold even when it's not the popular one. Your voice is not what you say. It's the way only you, the human being, would say it. Now I want to say something that might be a little bit controversial. I don't do that a lot. But the AI detector problem

is a real problem. So what happened to my client, it's real and it's not fair. And it's actually an industry level failure that I hope we find some way to address in the future. But if you're spending the majority of your energy trying to sound human enough to pass a test, you're optimizing for the wrong thing. Because the question should be, do your ideal clients recognize you when they read your content? Not the detector.

Not a journalist. Your clients. The people you're trying to attract. The people you care about. If someone who knows you read something you wrote and thinks that sounds exactly like her, that is what happened with my client. That's the test.

LinkedIn that her content sounds exactly like her, but she got flagged as AI.

The detector, the only test that matters for your business is that. The detector is someone else's problem to fix. Your voice is your problem to develop. And here's what I know from working with clients on this exact thing. The people who have done the voice work, who can actually articulate what makes them, them, those people have no identity crisis when someone questions their content. They have.

the receipts that matter to justify it. They have a decade of writing publicly that they can point to. And they have a pattern that's observable over time. And the people who struggle are the ones who have been performing a version of themselves for so long that they can't find the real person underneath the polish. You can't defend a voice that you've never

actually spent the time to develop yourself.

So here's the practical part because I don't want to leave you with a problem in no direction of what to do next. The first section of the mirror not mask diagnostic is indeed this voice check. And it's just a few questions. One, could the last five things you published have been written by anyone else in your field? Not similar to, actually lifted, dropped under their name and no one would have noticed? Because if yes,

It's not a content problem, it's a voice problem you've got. Two, when you write, do you start from what you actually think or from what you think you should be saying? Because those produce very, very different content. One is a mirror and one is a mask. You can usually feel the difference when you're writing the content. It feels either free, freeing to you or constrained. And then three.

the people who meet you in person say you sound exactly like your content? Or do they seem slightly surprised by you? Alignment between who you are in the room and who you are on a page, that's the goal of this. The gap between the two of those things is where the mask lives. You don't want that. And I'm not asking you to be a more raw or more casual or more vulnerable version.

I'm asking you to be more specifically yourself, be you. That's a completely different thing. There's no clean solution to the AI detector problem at an industry level that I can see right now. I have seen and read both sides. It's frustrating on all aspects. And I genuinely don't have an answer to this right now. I think it's going to get even messier before it gets better, unfortunately.

And I think people are going to get caught in the crossfire in ways that are and can be slightly unfair. My client was not the last person that's going to happen to. What I do have is this. The clearer your voice, the harder it is to mistake you for anyone else. Human or machine. Both. The more specifically you.

the more defensible. it's not because you've passed a sort of AI detector or a test, it's because there's only one of you. So build the mirror first. Everything else, the content, the AI workflows, the visibility strategy, all the content that comes after it. And if you want to start that process, the Mirror Not Mask Diagnostic is at mirrornotmask.com

And it takes you under five minutes and it will show you exactly where, where you're reflecting and where you're performing. I'll be back in two weeks and we're going to get into proof, which is where most experts lose the plot and all of this. So I'm going to see you then if you have any questions.

always feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on LinkedIn at my name, Gina Dunn, and always on my website at ogsolutions.nl. So I will see you soon. Bye.