A friend of mine, Ryan Leveque, sent out
a newsletter recently and a reader
publicly accused him
of using AI to write it.
And the evidence was that he used an
m-dash, that little line in the middle of
a sentence that
apparently was proof of a robot.
Now here's the thing, I know Ryan.
Ryan is a New York
Times bestselling author.
He has been writing with m-dashes for
years, long before chat GPT existed.
He didn't change, but the world around
him changed how it reads.
And it raises the question so many of us
are quietly wrestling with right now.
Do we use AI to help us write or not?
Is it frowned upon if we do?
And are we cheating?
And are we going to get called out?
Or are we just being smart with our time?
Well today I want to
talk about that tension.
And I want to show you both sides,
honestly and give you the simple one-time
fix that lets you use AI to go from raw
idea to a finished piece that sounds
exactly like you in minutes.
Because the
bottleneck in your business has
top of mind for a lot of people.
And now there's like this
divide that's happening.
Those that use AI and swear by it and
those that do not and frown upon it.
And so the question
is like what is right?
What is wrong?
Well before I tell you where I land on
this, let me tell you a quick story
because this one got personal
for me and honestly it stung.
Now there's an influencer that I follow,
got a massive following like half a
million plus and he was thinking of
launching a membership.
So he sent me a DM.
Now this happens quite often.
Like I'll get DMs and messages from
people that have established followings.
I'll get messages from people that have
got established memberships and they just
want my eyes and ears on their membership
and just to give them some feedback.
And so anyway, this person was a bit of a
niche celebrity and one day they reached
out to me for help with their membership
and I was like oh my
gosh this is incredible.
Like I'm honored right?
Somebody I admire
asking from my perspective.
So they had a real question about their
membership and so I literally sat down
and I wrote them back.
Not just like a quick one liner but like
a thoughtful detailed response.
I actually poured time into this response
because I genuinely wanted to help.
And then I didn't hear back from them.
And I was like that's weird.
You know like I spent
all this time and energy.
They asked for my help, I give them my
help and I don't hear back.
I'm like weird what's going on?
So a couple weeks go by
then I decided to follow up.
And then the person just hits me with a
one liner that just says well I just
figured that that was a
generic chat GPT response.
And so they didn't engage with it.
And it wasn't.
Like I didn't use chat GPT.
That was literally me
spending time writing a response.
So I didn't use chat GPT or AI at all.
I had handwritten
every word of that thing.
And so that message it hurt because I was
being accused of using AI almost as
though I was being accused of AI making
me lazy that I didn't really care that I
didn't spend time and it
was a copy and paste response.
But it was the complete opposite.
I had spent a ton of time on that.
And so this felt like a slap in the face.
So after all that I began thinking like
you know is AI good?
Is it bad?
How are people perceiving it?
And even in this case like I didn't use
AI but now this person thinks I used AI
and so they didn't respond.
Blah blah blah blah blah.
Here's where I sat with it afterwards.
This is the world that we're in now.
Your own writing the stuff that you spend
time on can get discredited the second
someone thinks it's AI.
It was in my case I didn't use AI at all
but yet he didn't like it and discredited
it and figured it was AI.
Same goes with Ryan Levesque.
His audience was accusing him of using AI
because he uses an m-dash in his writing.
Point of the matter is
it's the suspicion alone.
is where we are in the marketplace.
In my case I didn't use
AI but it didn't matter.
The suspicion alone was enough.
And it's not just me.
It is happening to everyone.
Which brings me into today's lesson.
See this is exactly the world that Ryan
ran into with that m-dash and it's why
people are nervous to even touch AI.
In his words he said quote "readers are
looking for every reason to dismiss your
work as AI" end quote.
He was nervous enough that he wrote
himself three rules for the AI era.
Number one for information
yes for a point of view no.
Number two when it's one
human to another disclose.
And number three is it helping you write
or helping you avoid writing?
Those are all good rules and we'll build
on them in today's episode.
this distrust isn't imaginary.
Only 14% of consumers say they fully
trust AI generated content.
This was according to Neil
Patel and his marketing stats.
And the share of people who say heavy AI
use lowers their trust in a brand jumped
from 20% in 2025 to 39% in 2026.
And a 2026 Gardner survey found roughly
half of US consumers would rather buy
from brands that don't use generative AI
in their consumer facing content.
And here's a wild one.
Everybody show that even labeling
identical content as AI generated makes
people rate it less
useful and less trustworthy.
So is the concern real?
Yes people are skeptical and they're
getting better at sniffing
out lazy generic content.
And I'm not here to wave that away.
But this brings me to point number one.
The AI tell is a myth
and the panic is misplaced.
Only the M dash witch
hunt doesn't hold up.
Stanford researchers found AI detectors
wrongly flagged over 61% of essays
written by non native
English speakers as AI.
False positives in some
data sets run as high as 25%.
Now here's what that means.
The tools and the people
copying the tools are guessing.
We're out here accusing real humans of
being robots because they
used a punctuation mark.
That's not a strategy.
That's a vibe.
So here's my honest take on this.
When I see writing that sounds like AI,
all it tells me is one thing that that
person hasn't spent the time
to create their voice guide.
The idea itself matters far more than
whether it has an M dash in it.
And so we don't want it to
sound like everyone else.
And that's exactly the
problem a voice guide solves.
And that brings me to point number two.
The one time fix for all this AI slop is
to build a voice guide.
So AI sounding generic isn't AI's fault.
It's that you handed it a
blank page and no instructions.
AI can't sound like you until you've
taught it what you sounds like.
And that's what a voice guide does.
You answer a few questions
about how you communicate.
You give it some real
examples of your own writing.
And from that point on, it
gives AI a set of instructions.
So it writes in your voice, your rhythm,
your phrases, your nuances.
And this is exactly why we built a free
tool to make it easy for people like you
and me and everyone else to be able to
create a voice guide, AKA a set of
instructions so that AI doesn't sound
like generic AI slop.
It actually sounds like you.
By the way, you can get it for free when
you go to voicecloner.io.
like I said, you're just going to answer
a few questions, drop in some examples of
your work, and then it's going to
generate the instructions that let AI
sound like you going forward.
So you do the work once and then it does
the heavy lifting every
single time after that.
Now, here's the warning.
This does not mean you just copy, paste,
and publish because AI gets you from idea
to draft really quickly.
But you still got to go back in.
You got to make sure that your stories,
your examples, your nuances are in there.
So AI gets you to the rough draft.
You put on all the polish and the soul.
And that brings me to point number three.
Read it the present, not just the past.
See, the trap that people fall into is
they let AI pull only from the past.
Old internet texts, last year's ideas.
That's how you end up sounding
stale and like everyone else.
But what you and I want is
AI pulling from right now.
What's happening with your clients this
week, the campaign that you just ran or
the result a member just got, the thing
that you're testing today.
That requires a system to
capture your present thinking.
A place to drop ideas as they hit.
A habit of pulling in current research or
notes from real conversations.
Proof it works is this very podcast.
The reason it always has fresh ideas is
that it's built on what we're actually
doing right now in our own memberships,
with our clients, in our campaigns, in
our experiments, in our business.
We're always doing the work and now the
work becomes the content.
So don't outsource your thinking to AI,
just outsource the typing, keep the
thinking and keep it current.
Is this making sense?
Okay, so here's what I want to encourage
you to do this week.
Go build your voice guide.
It is the highest leverage 20 minutes
that you'll spend this month.
Just go to voicecloner.io.
As I said, it's free.
You're going to answer the questions,
give it a few samples of your writing,
and then you're going to see immediately
how fast your idea in your head can then
be turned into finished
output that sounds like you.
Then I want you to establish the habit.
Set up one simple place to capture your
ideas as they happen, like this week.
So at the end of the day, do I think that
you and I should be using AI? I
do.
I think AI enables you and I to be able
to go from idea to a rough
draft at incredible speeds.
I think the ideas themselves are more
important than whether
somebody uses an M dash or not.
However, we don't want to be just
producing generic AI slop.
The way that we bring it to life is that
we feed it stories and ideas and our
thoughts of what is happening right now.
You got to guide AI.
This is why the voice
guide is so important.
I want to just take a moment and I just
want to thank you because my friend, you
have been helping us be able to get this
show into the hands and in front of more
people than ever before.
I just want to shout out to Rachel over
in the UK who left an incredible review.
She said, "I've been a Stu fan since I
did his membership course in 2020.
It changed my life and now have a
fabulous online business thanks to him.
I'm loving the bite-sized marketing tips
and the conversations
with amazing guests.
Keep up the amazing work, Team Stu."
Rachel, that was so kind of you.
Thank you, my friend.
And PS, if you have a moment, would you
mind going over to iTunes and or Spotify
and leaving a review because they said
that just helps us get in front of more
people and it also raises the credibility
so we can get bigger and
better guests on the show.
All right, let's wrap up today.
So the AI backlash is real.
People are skeptical and the quote,
"Sounds like AI is a genuine risk."
But the fix isn't to fear
AI or to hunt for M dashes.
It's to teach AI your voice and you do
this one time with a voice guide and then
you want to continuously feed AI your
present ideas, thoughts, experiments, the
things that you're working
on, your real work right now.
That's what comes out and that's what
makes whatever you're producing sound
fresh and unmistakably you.
AI didn't take your voice.
You just never gave it one.
So do that.
And then the only thing people will be
able to tell is that it
sounds exactly like you.
All right, my friend,
that's a wrap for today.
Go out there, go