Liza Adams

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I’ve been thinking about the "AI-written" label and why it stings so much for creators. It’s not just about the tools we use, it’s about where the soul of the work lives.

Last week, someone told me they run every email through a "humanizer" before hitting send. The irony is that the humanizer is just another AI, trying to guess what a human sounds like by adding intentional typos and rambling sentences.

We’re over-indexing on the wrapper and ignoring the gift inside.

I have a simple rule for my own work with Claude. If the AI provides the structure, I provide the friction. I push back on the easy metaphors. I delete the "In today's fast-paced world" openings. I add the specific detail about the coffee I spilled while writing the first draft.

That friction is where the value is created.

When we completely outsource the thinking, we end up with "slop"—content that is grammatically perfect and entirely empty. It’s the difference between a GPS and a map. One tells you exactly where to turn, the other helps you understand the landscape.

► The "So What?" test - Does this actually change how someone does their job tomorrow?

► The "Ugly Truth" - Am I sharing something that makes me or my company look less than perfect?

► The "Counter-Intuitive" - Is there a point in here that a standard LLM would argue against?

AI is a brilliant mirror. It reflects back what we give it. If we give it a lazy prompt, we get a lazy result. If we give it our lived experience, our hard-won data, and our specific constraints, it helps us see our own ideas more clearly.

So don't worry about the watermark. Worry about the work.

Build something worth reading because it has a perspective only you could have. The machines can copy the style, but they can't copy the journey it took to get there.

What’s one "human" detail you’ve added to your work this week that an AI never could have guessed?

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