How to Spot AI Content: When Writing Lacks Personality
What Pulp Fiction can teach you about making your content memorable
The sixth and final blog in a series discussing the great enshittification of the written word
In Pulp Fiction, Jules and Vincent Vega debate why Jules won’t eat pork. Vincent points out that dogs eat their own feces, yet Jules doesn’t consider them filthy animals.
“A dog’s got personality,” Jules says. “And personality goes a long way.”
Vincent barks back: “So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he’d cease to be a filthy animal?”
“We’d have to be talkin’ about one [expletive] charming pig,” Jules responds. “It’d have to be the Cary Grant of pigs.”
He’s joking, but he’s also right. Personality is the difference between being remembered and being scrolled past.
Last week, I spent some time analyzing competitor websites for a client. Each of the competitors had billions in market cap, thousands of engineers, and world-class marketing teams. But, you know what the odd thing was? Every homepage said the exact same thing.
AWS: “The center for all your data, analytics, and AI.”
Google: “Accelerate development with unified data and AI.”
Databricks: “Bring AI to your data to help you bring AI to the world.”
If you do the competitor swap test and cover up the company names, can you tell which is which? Didn’t think so. Well, neither can your prospects. When your value proposition can be shuffled like a deck of cards with no loss of meaning, you don’t have differentiated messaging, or as Emma Stratton calls the opposite of punchy in her book, Make It Punchy – content that sounds like everyone else’s.[1]
Then I found this on Medium from an author with a substantial following:
“The world of Artificial Intelligence is evolving at an unprecedented pace, ushering in what we at Google Cloud refer to as ‘The Agentic Age.’ This new era is defined by the rise of sophisticated AI agents that are not just tools but proactive partners, poised to fundamentally transform the way we work and interact with technology.”
Translation: “We built AI that does stuff on its own.” But we can’t just say that. We then need to insert the obligatory listicle breaking down the “Anatomy of an AI Agent” into six forgettable bullet points: Sense, Reason, Plan, Act, Memory, and Coordinate.
If you close this post, can you list the six components? Doubtful because your brain already deleted it. So, I suppose Jules was right, personality goes a long way. And B2B content right now? Certainly not enough to be the Cary Grant of pigs.
Your brain has a bullshit detector
Your brain filters out AI content the same way it filters out banner ads and spam. This isn’t a bug in your attention span. It’s pattern recognition working exactly as evolution designed it.
When you encounter the same linguistic structures repeatedly, your brain stops processing them as information and categorizes them as noise. “Unprecedented pace.” “Poised to transform.” “Unified platform.” Your cognitive bullshit detector flags these patterns and routes them straight to the mental trash bin before they ever reach conscious thought.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus proved this in the 1880s with his forgetting curve research. People forget approximately 50-70% of generic information within 24 hours. After a week, only 10-30% remains. Meaningless content disappears even faster. When information lacks personal relevance or emotional connection, your brain refuses to allocate storage space for it.
In the end, your prospects aren’t consciously choosing to ignore your content. Their brains are making that decision before they finish the first paragraph.
AI didn’t make you careful—it made you lazy
I think we all know the root cause of this personality void; you didn’t lose your voice because AI corrupted it. You traded it for efficiency because you’re drowning in the litany of work minutiae.
In a 2025 Adobe survey of over 1,600 marketers, 96% reported that content demand at least doubled over the past two years, with 62% seeing a fivefold or more increase.[2] Your company is doing more with less. The headcount was cut and budgets were slashed. But the content calendar? That stayed exactly the same size. So you found a shortcut. ChatGPT writes the first draft. Gemini polishes the messaging. Claude fixes the grammar. Hit publish, move to the next task, repeat.
Here’s a quick test. Pull up something you wrote in 2019, before ChatGPT existed. Read it. Now open your most recent blog post. Read that. Which one sounds like a human wrote it?
The gap between those two pieces isn’t about skill or intelligence, but rather, it’s about bandwidth. In 2019, you had time to think about what you actually wanted to say. In 2025, you have time to make sure the post goes live on schedule.
Now try this one. Open your email drafts folder. Search for messages you wrote but never sent. The angry ones, the frustrated ones, the ones with emotion. The emails where you actually said what you thought about that competitor’s positioning, or that product decision, or that industry trend everyone’s pretending makes sense.
That’s your real voice. You haven’t lost it. You’ve just stopped using it in public because it takes too long to say something real when you can say something safe in half the time.
The same Adobe research warns that relying on generative AI without a strategy results in “mass-produced, generic content” that limits a brand’s ability to stand out and drive engagement. You chose efficiency over everything else. And now your content sounds exactly like everyone else’s.
What legal review actually does to your personality
When I worked at Dell, I wanted to write product copy that said ‘This product is awesome!’ I knew better than to submit it. It would have come back from legal review as ‘This product is kind of good, I think.’
That’s not an exaggeration; it happened on many occasions. Every claim needed validation from trusted sources. Every statement of confidence became a hedge. Every bold claim got softened into a maybe. Every bit of personality got stripped out and replaced with qualifiers until nothing meant anything.
This is what we’re doing to all of our content. We’re hedging, qualifying, and softening every statement until we’ve said nothing at all. What of that?
Everyone tells you to “be authentic,” and “find your voice,” and “stand out from the crowd.” Then, legal or other reviewers strip out anything with conviction, and generative AI creates mediocre content that regresses you to the mean. Your boss wants you to “tone it down.” You’re terrified of offending someone, anyone, because no one wants to be cancelled. The belief persists that bland content is somehow safer than saying what you actually think.
The irony is suffocating. We’re all following the same advice, using the same AI tools, going through the same legal and review process, and ending up in the same place where everyone sounds exactly alike.
Being bland is the actual risk. When everyone sounds like everyone else, having an opinion becomes a competitive advantage. Saying “This product is awesome” matters more than saying “This product may potentially offer value in certain use cases, depending on your specific requirements and phase of the moon.”
Your prospects can smell the committee approval from a mile away. They know when legal has neutered your message. And they scroll right past it.
The personalities that actually broke through
Some companies figured this out before the rest of us drowned in AI-generated mediocrity.
Drift didn’t launch with “enterprise-grade conversational marketing solutions.” They said traditional marketing was broken and B2B buying had become a nightmare. Their blog posts had opinions. David Cancel wrote like a human having a conversation, not a press release generator. They took positions that made people in demand gen angry.
HubSpot’s early content had teeth. Before they became a billion-dollar platform, their blog called out bad marketing practices by name. They weren’t diplomatic about it. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah wrote posts that made competitors uncomfortable.
Gong shares actual sales call data instead of sanitized case studies. Their content shows what doesn’t work, not just what does. Chris Orlob’s LinkedIn posts sound like a human wrote them because a human actually did (or at least assisted). They’re willing to say “most sales calls are terrible” and then prove it with transcripts and conversion data.
These companies took actual positions. They said specific things. They were willing to alienate some people to connect deeply with the right people. They chose conviction over consensus.
Drift said traditional marketing was broken. Not “needed optimization.” Broken. That’s personality. That’s a voice your prospects can remember.
Your prospects don’t need another vendor telling them about unified platforms and seamless integration. They need someone who understands their actual problem and is willing to say something specific about how to solve it.
Personality goes a long way
Jules was right about more than just dogs and pigs. Personality goes a long way. It covers weaknesses. It makes up for shortcomings. It’s the difference between being chosen and being ignored.
Be the Cary Grant of pigs. Or at least have more personality than one.
To review the entire series: https://prompts.tinytechguides.com/p/the-great-enshittification-of-the
About David Sweenor
Books: Artificial Intelligence | Generative AI Business Applications | The Generative AI Practitioner’s Guide | The CIO’s Guide to Adopting Generative AI | Modern B2B Marketing | The PMM’s Prompt Playbook
Founder of TinyTechGuides, David Sweenor is a top 25 analytics and AI thought leader and influencer, international speaker, consultant and advisor, and acclaimed author with several patents. He is a product marketing leader, analytics practitioner, and specialist in the business application of AI, ML, data science, IoT, and business intelligence.
With over 25 years of hands-on business analytics experience, Sweenor has supported organizations including Alation, Alteryx, TIBCO, SAS, IBM, Dell, and Quest, in advanced analytic roles.
Follow David on Twitter @DavidSweenor and connect with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsweenor/.
Need help with PMM? Let me know.
[1] Sweenor, David. “How to Write Punchy B2B Messaging That Actually Converts.” Prompts by TinyTechGuides, August 12, 2025. https://prompts.tinytechguides.com/p/how-to-write-punchy-b2b-messaging
[2] Adobe, “AI and Digital Trends Report 2025,” Adobe Business, 2025, https://business.adobe.com/resources/digital-trends-report.html.