You can usually clock the post by the structure alone. Big confident opener. Clean spacing. Then the familiar cadence: “It’s not just X. It’s Y.” It reads like someone hit “generate,” felt a sense of accomplishment, and went back to their cold brew.
The photo is doing its own performance. The “liquid-glass” filter is perfect. The confidence is implied. The arms are crossed in a way that suggests Chat was told, “Make this person look authoritative,” and did its best with zero lived experience. The image and the caption feel loosely acquainted, like coworkers who share a Slack channel, but no actual projects.
After a while, you develop a reflex. You either scroll past on muscle memory or you catch yourself actually reading a post and feel that brief, mildly personal sense of betrayal when you realize you’ve just been softly marketed to by a person with a content calendar. It’s basically ad fatigue, except the ads are your peers and no one is getting paid for it, which feels like a very inefficient way to lose everyone’s attention.
What’s actually alienating people isn’t the presence of ideas, but the absence of a real-life person. When a post is clearly formatted by a template and written in a generic voice, it doesn’t feel like a human being is sharing a point of view. It feels like someone running a content program. The reach might still be there, but the trust is not.
My generation was spiritually mentored by comeback movies. The Mighty Ducks normalized being a mess until the final quarter. Air Bud lowered the hiring bar. Free Willy proved that one big emotional moment can erase a long list of questionable decisions. We want the messy middle. We want the part where something didn’t work, got reworked, and finally landed. The clean win with no friction reads like a résumé bullet. The process reads like experience.
What tends to cut through right now looks less like thought leadership and more like proof. A cropped dashboard with context. A before-and-after that includes the awkward middle. A post that admits a strategy didn’t land and walks through what changed. None of that is glamorous, but it signals judgment, which is what people are actually scanning for when they decide whom they trust.
AI isn’t the villain here, if we’re being honest. Most teams are using it in some capacity and that’s fine. The problem shows up when the tool becomes the voice.
If your post could belong to anyone, it’s probably not doing much for you.
