The rise of AI – and why unprofessionalism is now encouraged
Do you remember the pinnacle moment of AI just a few years ago — that cursed video of Will Smith eating spaghetti? Ah… those were the days.
Fast forward to now, and with tools like Sora, it’s genuinely getting hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake, it’s equal parts impressive, and terrifying.
It’s gotten to the point that just the other day my partner and I got caught by an AI video, the duo who never thought a computer could trick us got… (whats the past-tense of ‘tricked’?)… trunked?
Just last year, I wrote a blog about how to spot AI in marketing, and this year, I’ve got people telling me I’m using AI in my writing.
Which is quite funny, considering I now go out of my way not to, I use it to count numbers in spreadsheets or collate data from surveys — you know, the boring admin bits, mainly because I didn’t like the way AI’s copywriting looked, ever since the latest update it just doesn’t feel like it’s trying, and in turn, it makes my life harder having to ask it to correct 100 things, to the point I just optimise and write my own copy and ask it to grammar and spell check… But apparently, even that’s now suspicious behaviour.
I’ve noticed something weird lately: unprofessionalism has become a sign of authenticity, posts with typos, dodgy formatting, or rogue full stops get better engagement than the polished stuff. It’s like people are seeing mistakes and thinking, “Ah yes, this is a real human being, let me give them my money.”
Out of curiosity, I ran one of my own emails through an AI detector the other day as I’ve heard it’s not always accurate. It came back as 90% AI. Which is wild, because I spent ten minutes writing it and another ten minutes removing exclamation marks to the sufficient amount (still to be determined, is it 1,2,5?!) and adding a smiley face (so I don’t sound passive aggressive while asking if someone can join a zoom call), followed by re-reading it 5 times so I haven’t accidentally called them mum or a swear word due to a typo, and then even after pressing send I will read it from the Sent folder so I can see it ‘from their point of view’.
On a side note; I still have flashbacks to 5 years ago when I sent my boss an email without double checking, and somehow wrote “I hope you age” which does come across as a niche insult.
Em dashes are best practice in writing, any copywriter will tell you that. They’re clean, they give your words room to breathe. but now we’ve got it ingrained in our minds that if you see the trusted ‘–’ then you better go grab your pitchforks and hunt the person down like a witch in the middle ages.
Even when I’m texting I would use a dash to break up my sentence and help it read better (I only learned how to do ‘–’ just the other day on my laptop, if you’re curious and would like people to think you’re an AI, press ‘option’ then the dash button).
I do it too, i’ll see someone post “It’s not about X, it’s about Y,” and immediately think, “CLANKER!’ 🫵🏼” Then I remember… AI LEARNED from speech and text patterns from real humans, we talk like this, and now we’re suspicious of our own patterns.
It’s not just me losing faith in what’s real…
A 2023 study from the University of Mainz (yes I looked up research papers about this, the temptation to use Chat GPT was incredibly strong but I’m very brave) looked at how people judge AI-written content versus human writing, and found that readers rated AI-generated text just as trustworthy as human work, sometimes even clearer and more engaging. Over 600 participants read pieces written by both, and they couldn’t tell which was which. So maybe that explains it: we’ve trained ourselves to associate polished grammar and neat structure with credibility, but then that credibility is questioned when something comes across as too polished.
Then there’s trust, a 2025 study from Notre Dame and Deloitte tested this with over 300 people using a chatbot experiment, just adding a little “[1]” citation number at the end of an AI-generated answer made people trust it more — even when the citations were completely random, but then the trust dropped the moment people actually clicked to check them.
So… apparently, we trust AI the most when we don’t look too deep.
It’s almost poetic, isn’t it? The more something looks right, the less we believe it’s real, but then the second it pretends to explain itself, we believe it instantly.
We’ve created a culture where being polished feels untrustworthy and being slightly chaotic feels authentic. We’re all sleuthing around online, carefully curating our typos and lowercase sentences to make sure we look “real” (whatever that is anymore), we’re performing imperfection, and it’s encouraged.
I’m probably not the first person to be accused of using AI in my text, and while AI becomes more accessible and affordable, I won’t be the last.
As a marketer, it feels like an insult to be told my work looks like I copied and pasted it from ChatGPT. Before, that was a compliment, it meant your writing was as sharp and structured as something built by a computer that knows everything, but now, if someone says it “looks like AI,” it implies you’re lazy or you’re cheating.
And for marketers, that’s where it gets tricky, for years, we were told to aim for perfection — perfect headlines, perfect hooks, perfect tone. Now we’re being told to leave the rough edges in, to sound less corporate, less automated, more… messy.
But authentic isn’t the same as careless, there’s still a craft in sounding human without sounding like you’ve just been released into the wild internet for the first time.
So maybe that’s the new challenge for us: not fighting AI, but finding the line between being real and being recognisably human, not over-editing our words until they lose all warmth, but not leaning so far into the chaos that we sound like parody accounts.
Because the truth is, AI isn’t killing creativity, it’s just holding up a mirror, and what we’re really reacting to… is the fact that it’s starting to sound a little too much like us.
As an FYI - AI text detectors aren’t really accurate, but just for the sake of it..
It’s taken me about a week to write this blog, and it’s more of a rant than anything else, and a place to vent my concerns of the rise of AI use and people confusing authenticity with AI generated slop.
I also recommend watching this video from Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell which talks about AI slop and how it’s destroying the internet - a part I never considered until watching this video is the rise of fake authority content, and how if an AI bot writes a blog about something fake, another AI will pick it up and believe it to be factual and have a source to link it back to.
Yaaay, misinformation…
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