The AI witch hunt is getting weird

Time for another unhinged Friday rant, but this one has a softer centre. Stay with me.

There's this thing happening right now between business owners and I'm naming it, because I don't think it's making any of us better and I'm fairly sure it's making some of us hide more than we were before.

Here it is: we have all started using AI, and for some reason we have all simultaneously started policing each other for it.

The same people who use it are bashing other people for using it? Make that make sense...

The tell-hunting has become a sport and I know you've seen it...

Someone posts something decent and the comments turn into a forensics lab.

"That's an em dash." "No human says 'delve'." "Three bullet points and a rhetorical question? Busted."

We are out here scanning each other's captions like we're marking a plagiarism report. Grown adults with businesses to run, squinting at punctuation.

I don't use em dashes anymore. Do you know why? Not because I don't like them my friends, they were pretty useful... and for the record I DID write with them before LOL. But now I can't use them because it's the only thing people will see in my writing and suddenly I'm on the chopping block!

So in my opinion, the fear of someone calling you out for using AI is a genuinely stupid reason to change how you write, and yet here we all are.

Before this whole AI "you use it so you're bad" vs "you don't use it you're behind" vs "you sometimes use it sometimes don't, you obviously don't care about the environment"... look, there's going to be opinions no matter what you do. But before all of this, nobody ever asked if you hand-coded your email template or demanded to know if you used canva instead of photoshop to design your images did they?

Nobody checked if the photo was edited, if the testimonial was lightly tidied, if you used a template, a swipe file, a course framework, a VA, a copywriter, a spellchecker, or your sister who's good at words.

We accepted, for the entire history of small business, that people use tools and help. And then one specific tool showed up and suddenly it's a character issue.

So anyways, if you know me in real life, then you know that I talk. A lot. I have stories, half-formed rants, things a client said on Tuesday that I want to turn into something useful.

I use AI to help me listen, shape ideas or drafts... then I tear those drafts apart, put my actual stories back in... cut the words I would never say, add a joke (or the ridiculous gifs you see in these emails), and fix anything that might sound like a press release.

Nothing goes out as-is. Not once. Not ever.

It's an extremely fast assistant who never once gets tired of me rambling at 9pm about notetaker bots. That's it. That's the whole scandal.

I guess to summarize (and I have many more thoughts but I can't add them here or this email would be longer than it already is)...

How about we just start lifting each other up instead of calling each other out? Because what fricken' good does that do? Maybe makes you feel superior for a few minutes until you realize "crap, maybe there's a way for me to do some things more efficiently if I embrace the technology?" Also spoiler alert: every platform you're using likely has AI baked into it, so good luck moving away from it unless you intend on handwriting postcards and mailing them to your clients.

Annnnnnyways

👉 The question was never "did a machine touch this." The question is "is it true, is it useful, and does it actually sound like the person who sent it."

If the answer is yes, who cares what got them there.

If the answer is no... that was already bad content. AI didn't do that. AI just made it faster to produce badly.

Building something on your own is hard enough without your peers running your sentences through a virtual lie detector.

Lift people up. Even the ones whose paragraphs are suspiciously well-structured.

Rant over.

Kind of.

-Brittany