Human Authenticity & Trust: Why It Matters More Than Ever
In my previous post, I introduced the 3 human things I believe keep you relevant in an AI world. In this post, I'm going deeper on the first one: authenticity and trust.
The Flood
You've probably noticed the shift, especially over the past few months. More people are posting, more often, more confidently, about more things. And a lot of it is starting to sound the same.
AI has made it incredibly quick and simple to generate content at scale. That's a massive unlock, and it's meant more people adopting it, whether they were already creating content or not. The previously time-consuming work is now cheap at scale.
Now all you need is a prompt or an automated agent finding what's trending and generating posts for you automatically. Whether it's the latest "insane" model from [pick any provider], or "AGI is here", or "SaaS is dead", or "Why I bought a $10,000 Mac Studio", or "My team of 54 agents runs my entire business while I sleep"... the noise is everywhere, and it is loud!
It seems like people are gaming the system and being rewarded for it. The recycled frameworks. The "10 lessons I learned" posts that were learned from someone else's "10 lessons" post. The engagement-bait carousels generated and scheduled without a second thought. They're getting reach.
What This Does to Trust
If you've been in your industry any length of time, you can already filter the real from the performed. That's not new. But what is new is how much harder that filter is working. AI dropped the barrier to sounding credible, not being credible.
The platforms reward viral content. And the posts going viral love to play into human psychology: hype, FOMO, desire, laziness. People like, share, and buy into these things, and so the platforms push more of it.
The reality is the masses don't want boring, hard, slow, long-game, high-effort stuff. If someone's being told they can build their own business, their own software, make more than their day job, have more free time, without coding skills, without hiring developers, without raising millions in funding, only managing a few hours a day, they're buying into it.
Then they discover it's not that easy. Nobody told them about all the behind-the-scenes stuff required to actually succeed. So they try the next hyped up thing, or eventually give up, because it's all "fake".
The signals we once used to filter out the fluff don't work the way they did. A well-written post used to mean someone had thought carefully about it, and their expertise showed.
Now it might mean they spent 30 seconds with a prompt.
Self-correcting Back to "Who you Know"
If you're someone who only shares when you've got something meaningful to say, it becomes harder to break through the noise.
But people are starting to wake up. People are getting burned, losing trust, and yearning for authenticity and connection. Faceless brands that pop up every second day will begin to fade.
Because people are going back to the age-old trust signals. Your real network. Word of mouth from trusted sources:
"My best friend's cousin did our landscaping, he's brilliant, here's his number."
"I love your hair, who do you go to?"
Human relationships where trust is intrinsic, referenceable, and proof is visible.
Of course, we don't all run local businesses where proximity helps. So how do we build that same kind of trust from afar, globally, where we probably don't shop at the same grocery store?
We build audiences around ourselves, authentically. And we do it without muddying that authenticity with the same regurgitated, machine-generated content everyone else is posting.
If you do post the real stories, the blood, the sweat, the tears, the sacrificed weekends, the strained relationships, it might not feel like it gets as much love and attention, but volume shouldn't be the goal.
Your ideal customer will care. They will seek you out. Because you are real, and that's becoming rare.
You are the Moat
Start by looking at who you trust. Who do you follow online? Not the shorts, the reels, the flashy ad campaigns, but the actual content you feel most connected to, learn from, and keep going back to?
For me, it's the longer-form content creators. The people who are way ahead of me in business, but who I feel like I know. Their personality, their founder stories, their values, their background and lived experience.
Alex Hormozi won't be everyone's cup of tea, and on the surface he probably shouldn't be mine either. It's not the big muscles, the white singlets, or the goat nasal strips I connect with.
But I do like that he is just him. Not dressing to fit the traditional mould of what a $100M+ businessman "should" look like, or speaking the way a $100M+ businessman "should" sound like.
I like the way he illustrates what he's teaching on large rolls of paper. I like that he doesn't sugarcoat or sprinkle fluff. He's shared his origin story, and he doesn't come across like someone pretending.
Daniel Priestley has a completely different vibe. He's an Aussie living in the UK, a family man who just seems down to earth, as if he lives next door.
He doesn't post a new video the minute the latest model drops to tell everyone they need to get on it right now. He doesn't claim some AI tool runs his entire business.
But he has built authority, influence, and credibility. He's built trust over years by sharing what he's genuinely learned, not by chasing the latest hype train.
Two very different people. Same niche in many ways. Both valuable to me for completely different reasons. And that's the point. Two people in the same space, with different experiences and different personalities, will connect with different audiences, or the same audiences for different reasons.
Sharing your lived experience and building your personal brand authentically isn't in competition with someone else's. It is your moat.
AI as Leverage
AI can write about your industry. It can sound convincing doing it, and it's probably better at many things. But it can't replicate the specific way you see things, the personality you bring, or the stories that come from having actually lived through something. Your unique origin story. You can't fake that specificity.
Yes, people can and do tell AI to make up a "personal experience story" and post it without disclaiming it's fiction. Some of them are making money doing it.
But it's a bet against time. When audiences are already pulling toward authenticity, building your presence on fabrication is building on ground that's shifting underneath you.
This is not to say we should not use AI to help create content, that's not the problem. AI as a tool to move faster, structure better, get your thinking out of your head and into something shareable? That's the right use.
It's part of how I approach content, and it's central to something I've been building. But if you're using AI as a replacement for having something meaningful to say, that's how you become the noise you're trying to cut through.
Becoming the Signal
Building a business behind closed doors isn't building a business. If you don't know who I am, how I see the world, what I can bring to the table and how I can help you or your business, then we both miss out.
So I'm going to start posting more. Sharing my journey, my experiences, my failures and successes as I continue to build. Not to create more noise. Not to put myself in the limelight. But because I genuinely believe we're doing ourselves and our audiences a disservice if we stay quiet and hidden behind our screens.
And I do love building things, sharing what I know, helping others, being a part of a community of like-minded people.
I'd love to hear from you. What does this look like in your world? Are you feeling the pressure of the flood? How do you stay visible without losing what makes your content yours?
I'm building a few things right now:
Agentic intelligence in the customer order management space
AI + human writing tools
A fun sudoku app
And a few other personal POCs I might turn into something more serious. I'm going to keep sharing what I'm learning as I build. What interests you most?
