Why going live is your unfair advantage in the AI era

Let me get this out of the way first. I’m an AI addict. I use it every single day, and nobody is going back to chalk and chalkboards, least of all me. So if you’re here hoping I’ll say it’s all slop and we should write everything with a quill, sorry.

But something big has shifted in the last couple of years, and I don’t think most business owners have caught up with it yet.

Decent content is free now

A few years ago, a well-structured article or a tidy carousel took skill or money. Having them said something about you.

Now anyone can make endless amounts of perfectly acceptable content in an afternoon, and loads of people are doing exactly that. So there’s a mountain of decent-looking marketing out there, and it’s worth roughly nothing.

Which is awkward. Because making decent-looking marketing is exactly what most of us spent the last five years learning to do.

The shinier it looks, the more people wonder who actually wrote it.

The debranding problem

Honestly, this one drives me up the wall.

People write something in their own voice, with their own odd phrasing and a proper opinion in it. Then they paste it into ChatGPT and ask it to tidy it up. What comes back is smoother, emptier, and could have been written by literally anyone.

ChatGPT will happily be a debranding machine if you let it. You pop your personality in one end and something vanilla drops out the other.

And your audience can tell. Not always consciously, and not always correctly. But they’re using these tools all day as well, so they know what the output looks like. They know the long dash. They know that rhythm. The second they spot it they stop reading, and it doesn’t matter at all whether they were right.

You can’t fake live

Which brings me to going live. I know. Hear me out.

When everyone’s feed is wall to wall with AI-generated stuff, a live show is proof you’re real. You really can’t fake live very easily. That’s pretty much the whole argument, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple.

Think about what actually happens in a live hour. Somebody asks a question you didn’t see coming and you have to think on your feet. You lose your thread, go “hang on, where was I?”, and find it again. The wifi drops and you’re stood there refreshing the page while everyone watches you do it. None of that can be generated, and all of it is proof there’s a person there.

You’ve got one asset nobody can copy, and it’s you. When everything else gets cheap, it makes sense to lean hard on whatever didn’t.

Where AI fits

Right now, loads of people are teaching how to use AI. Hardly anyone is teaching how to use it to make you more human. I think that gap is where all the opportunity is.

AI slop is what you get when you ask a machine to make something out of nothing. Give it nothing of yours and it fills the space with the average of everybody else, which is literally what an average is. The fix is to put something real in at the start, like an hour of you actually talking.

High-quality human input at the start is what buys you good output everywhere after it.

So do the human thinking first. Get it the wrong way round and you’ve automated the only valuable part, which is a very odd way to save time.

What I’m really asking you to do

I’ll be honest about how big this ask is. I’m saying the way to stand out in a world of endless AI content is to be clearly, obviously yourself in public, on a schedule, with no edit button.

That’s harder than posting. It’s miles harder than asking AI for a week of captions. I can’t make it comfortable for you, because every comfortable option just got automated.

Here’s the upside, though. It’s now the cheapest real advantage a one-person business can have. Nobody can outspend you on being you. That used to be the sort of thing people printed on a mug. I think it’s now the actual strategy.