So, you think you can tell when something you’re reading was written by AI versus a human? Sure, there are the obvious tells—like excessive em dash use by writers who rarely, if ever, used them before. There’s also every AI bot’s favorite trope, “it’s not just a [product], it’s a [wordier description of said product!].” AI-generated content is often redundant, formulaic, and superficial—saying a lot without really saying much. 

But it’s not always clear whose voice we’re reading, especially as time passes and AI usage increases. AI learns more each time it’s used. It learns a user’s tone of voice and writing style while capturing nuances and preferences (e.g., when to use bullet points or whether to use the Oxford comma). With every prompt it completes, AI gets better at writing like humans.  

And with every prompt completed, our space is more and more saturated with AI-generated content. Last year, SEO firm Graphite published a report estimating that more than half of online content is now AI-generated.  

These observations are what make our current content and media landscape so tricky to navigate. Readers know when something is off, even if they can’t always point to exactly what. And if they’re questioning whether something is AI, there’s more than a 50 percent chance they’re right. As a result, there’s a shift happening in how audiences decide what to trust. This gradual change is subtle and possibly imperceptible to anyone who isn’t looking for it. But content teams are looking and taking note.  

The Playbook Is Outdated

The old playbook is losing its grip. The standard practice in recent years has been to publish content—be it AI- or human-generated—consistently across platforms and let the algorithm do the rest. Now, that’s being replaced by something simpler that takes us back to basics: letting real people say real things. 

As skepticism around AI-generated content grows, audiences are getting sharper at sniffing out the content that’s hollow or insincere. No matter how well-formatted and confident in their claims, articles that lack a clear voice, lived experience behind them, and genuine perspective are beginning to register as background noise (at best) or untrustworthy (at worst). 

Consumers’ aversion to uncanny, inauthentic content has created an opportunity for brands to invest in an option that’s so simple it’s been overlooked, but now carries significant weight: human credibility.  

Giving a Face to Expertise

One of the clearest examples of this shift is the call for and use of subject matter experts (SME). When an HVAC brand publishes an article authored by its performance construction manager, or a university taps an admissions counselor to write a blog, readers respond differently and more favorably than they do to seeing “staff writer” in the byline. The voice they’re reading holds weight because someone with real stakes and lived experience is behind it. 

The logic applies across industries: a named person sharing professional expertise within content is more credible than content without human attribution. Public-facing SMEs improve brand credibility in diverse industries, from healthcare to hospitality and building products to banking. 

Giving the Customer a Voice

Customer voices are contributing, too, to this “new” approach. Testimonials have long been a part of marketers’ arsenal, but instead of polished quotes formatted to fit a landing page, we’re increasingly getting to hear the full story. Companies are seeing the merits of allowing their customers to share their experiences as they actually happened.  

And while, yes, anything a brand publishes will ultimately paint them in a good light, there is a vulnerability to providing insight from real customer voices into the frictions, learning curves, and unexpected hurdles that they encountered on their way to satisfactory results. And it’s a vulnerability that prospective customers appreciate. 

The more specific and unscripted customer stories feel, the more they tend to resonate. Audiences are distinguishing between content that was created to convert and content that exists to inform—and they’re far more trusting of the latter. 

Earning Editorial Trust is Worth the Effort

Lastly, editorial voices are also regaining focus. Instead of chasing reach through channels where credibility is thin, brands are finding the value in collaborating with journalists, independent writers, and niche media personalities who have all spent years building and earning their audiences. Earning a feature in the right outlet, authored by someone readers already trust, positions a brand differently than a sponsored post ever could.  

Platforms Still Matter, People Just Matter More

None of this means platforms don’t matter. Reach and distribution still count, but what brands are putting out there and whose voice is behind it is doing more of the heavy lifting than it has in recent years. 

For content teams navigating the rocky terrain of AI versus human content, the question is straightforward: who are the real humans inside or in close proximity to our brand who have something genuine to say? Find them, give them the platform, and then let their perspectives lead the conversation. This approach is one of the most effective strategies for regaining and keeping consumers’ trust. 

A Peek Behind the Curtain

As creators and content writers, we consider what it means for AI to approximate real human voices, but our concern could go the other way, too. 

After drafting this article, I decided to run it through an AI detector. It read my text and came back with a whopping “21 percent chance this text is a mix of human and AI.” Yikes.

I typed every word of text on this page, but that wasn’t clear to the AI behind the AI-detecting program. After a moment of frustration, I started looking for language that felt inauthentic and made revisions. It just goes to show that although this blog’s author is 100 percent human, it isn’t always obvious whether that’s the case. Yes, AI is getting better at writing like humans, but its widespread use might also be influencing humans to write like AI. 

Remember the “new” strategy we talked about earlier? Letting real people say real things? That’s something even professional copywriters need to practice. In this case, that meant relaxing the overall tone a bit. In other cases, it might mean the opposite. As real human writers, it’s our job to figure out what our content needs to best convey authenticity. 

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