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Last week, someone replied to one of my posts in Slack with: “This looks written by AI.”

The implication was familiar. AI-written equals lazy. Cheap. Not worth your time.

I want to push back on that, because I think it gets the diagnosis wrong. The problem isn’t AI. The problem is that the writer didn’t bring any taste to the work, and AI made it cheap to quickly ship a first draft.

Good content is good content. The bar hasn’t changed. What’s changed is who clears it.

The “looks written by AI” critique has an obvious blind spot

The data on AI in marketing is well past the tipping point. Salesforce’s State of Marketing 2026 reports that 87% of marketers now use generative AI in at least one recurring workflow, up from 51% in Q1 2024. HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing puts AI tool usage among marketers at 86.4%, with content creation as the top use case.

When the practice is that universal, “this looks written by AI” stops being a craft critique. It becomes a tell about the critic, not the writer. You’re not catching someone in the act of cutting corners. You’re catching them in the act of doing what nearly everyone in your industry is now doing.

Even Google doesn’t care if AI was involved

For anyone who still thinks AI authorship is the problem, Google’s official guidance is unambiguous: “Google’s focus is on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced.” They penalize low-quality content produced at scale to manipulate search rankings. They do not penalize AI assistance.

The algorithm everyone fears has already decided this question. It’s about the work, not the tool.

The skeptics are right about one thing: the slop is real. “Slop” was Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year, defined as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” A NYT investigation reported by Fortune found over 40% of YouTube Shorts being recommended to children showed signs of being AI-generated, prompting 200+ child-safety groups to send an open letter to Google – For some reason, my kids love this slop, which is why YouTube is banned in my house!

The cultural backlash is real. But is the cause AI, or is it humans choosing to ship work nobody wanted?

What people actually mean by “looks AI-written”

When you read a piece and think this feels AI-generated, you’re picking up specific patterns. The community-tracked list at Wikipedia’s “Signs of AI writing” is the most thorough working catalog: formulaic openings (“in today’s fast-paced digital landscape”), constructions like “it’s not just about X, it’s about Y,” lists of three items the same length, em-dashes at notably above-human density, and a tidy concluding summary of the post you just read.

These aren’t AI tells. They are craft tells. A writer with taste cuts every one of them on the second pass.

That’s the actual job. The first draft is cheap now. Anyone can get one in thirty seconds. The work is the editing. The work is recognizing the cliché and refusing to ship it. The work requires taste.

How I actually use AI

For full disclosure, here’s the workflow I run on every piece, including this one.

I start with my own thinking. Often, a five-minute voice memo while I’m walking. Me talking through an idea, raw and unedited. The opinion is mine before AI sees a word.

I transcribe it and hand it to a model. Not to “write the post” but to organize my thoughts. Pull out the through-line. Show me where I contradicted myself. Suggest three structures.

I lean on AI for the parts I’m objectively bad at. Headlines. Subject lines. Hooks. Tightening paragraphs that ran long. Generating ten variations of a CTA so I can pick the one that doesn’t sound like every other CTA on the internet.

Then I rewrite, cut, and add. Every published piece goes through me with a heavy hand. I rewrite anything that sounds like AI wrote it. I add the specific examples, the names, the actual opinions. The parts only I would write.

This isn’t a fringe workflow. HubSpot’s report found that only 4% of marketers use AI to write entire pieces of content. Most use it for inspiration and outlines, exactly as I do. The “this looks written by AI” critique is, in practice, attacking a use case almost nobody is running.

Taste is the moat. Here’s what that means in email.

Taste is knowing what you like. Knowing good from bad. Having an opinion on how something should be.

It’s not about right and wrong. It’s the thing you build from your own experience and use to shape your own style. Taste shows up in what you wear, what you put in your house, the art you stop and look at, and the music you put on. And it shows up in writing and design too.

If you have taste, you know good copy from bad copy. The source doesn’t matter. AI can write bad copy. Humans write bad copy all the time. The “this looks AI-written” critique pretends only one of those is happening. Both are happening, constantly, and have been since long before ChatGPT existed.

In email, taste is the call you make on the small stuff that decides whether a campaign works. It’s knowing the third subject line in a re-engagement series is the one that decides the outcome. It’s knowing that adding social proof above the fold lifts CTR more reliably than another testimonial below it. It’s knowing when a hero image is doing real work and when it’s just decoration. It’s knowing that “Quick question” is overused in B2B and dead in DTC, and that “we owe you an apology” still pulls but only if you actually owe one.

That’s the moat. It’s not “human writes the words.” It’s “human with taste decides which words ship.”

“Did AI write this?” is the wrong question

The right question is: is this any good?

Good content teaches you something, makes you laugh, changes your mind, or gives you a tactic you’ll use on Monday. The tools that produced it are irrelevant. If it’s slop, formulaic, said-nothing, sounds-like-everybody-else slop, the writer didn’t do their job. AI didn’t fail them. They failed themselves!

That’s the bar going forward. Not “human-written.” Not “AI-free.” Just one question – was this worth the reader’s time?

Your turn. Are you using AI in your content workflow? If so, where does it live? Ideation, drafting, editing, all of the above? And what’s your line in the sand for the parts that don’t get the AI treatment?

Much love,
Andy

Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @emaillove