Othering your expertise: a lesson for brands in bad AI writing
Failure to own your subject matter is a massive AI Tell
One of the recurring patterns I see in AI-generated brand content is logic that automatically others the subject.
A brand writing about its own specialism should own that subject. They should write in the first person, the present tense and be authoritative: we do this, this is our solution, here's what we know. That's how expertise sounds and that's how I write (and tell clients) on here.
But lazy, unedited AI content eventually falls into the same traps. The X isn't Y, it's Z construction. The not just X, but Y problem. This is framing that holds the subject at arm's length instead of claiming it.
I got my Claude to write me an example of this so you can see it:
"Supply chain visibility isn't just a nice-to-have – it's become a strategic imperative. Visibility isn't simply about tracking shipments. It's about understanding the entire ecosystem of dependencies, risks and decision points that determine whether goods arrive on time and on budget."
How dull is that?
When an AI writes like this, it pushes the subject off the brand's territory and onto a neatly-lit plinth in the middle of the room – something to point at, not something to own. The reader's attention moves away from the brand and towards the abstracted topic (if, indeed, it's held at all). The brand has disowned its own specialism.
Two things happen when writing like this goes unedited:
It signals 100% AI authorship and readers feel it. The authenticity and lived experience, which is what the brand is trying to sell, is completely absent.
It detaches the brand from its own subject matter. The topic becomes utterly contextless and expertise-free. The brand then has to work on rebuilding the reader's trust through the rest of the piece.
Obviously I'm not advocating not using AI to create content. We all do it so let's not fight that battle – and AI is really good at providing the first draft. I'm advocating that brands edit AI content properly. Hunt for every moment where your writing pushes your subject into the third person and pull it back into yours. If you don't do this then you join the hordes of other brands talking about a topic on a plinth, rather than actually owning it.