The writing style just has several AI-isms; at this point, I don't want to point them out because people are trying to conceal their usage. It's maybe not as blatant as some examples, but it's off-putting by the first couple paragraphs. Anymore, I lose all interest in reading when I notice it.

I would much, much, much rather read an article with imperfect English and mistakes than an LLM-edited article. At least I can get an idea of your thinking style and true meaning. Just as an example - if you were to use a false friend [1], an LLM may not deal with this well and conceal it, whereas if I notice the mistake, I can follow the thought process back to look up what was originally intended.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

For me it's a general feel of the style, but something about this stands out:

>We're not against AI tools. We use them constantly. What we're against is the idea that using them well is a strategy. It's a baseline.

The short, staccato sentences seem to be overused by AI. Real people tend to ramble a bit more often.

Most of the subheadings starting with "The" and "What Actually" is a bit of a giveaway in my view.

Not exclusive to AI, but I'd be willing to bet any money that the subheadings were generated.

> Using them isn't an advantage, but not using them is a disadvantage. They handle the production part so we can focus on the part that actually matters: acquiring the novel input that makes content worth creating.

I would argue that using AI for copywriting is a disadvantage at this point. AI writing is so recognisable that it makes me less inclined to believe that the content would have any novel input or ideas behind it at all, since the same style of writing is most often being used to dress up complete garbage.

Foreign-sounding English is not off-putting, at least to me. It even adds a little intrigue compared to bland corporatese.

You admit it yourself here:

> I run a marketing agency. We use Claude, ChatGPT, Ahrefs, Semrush. Same tools as everyone else. Same access to the same APIs.

Since you use it for your job of course you use it for this blog, and that will make people look harder for AI signs.

> AI just helped clean up the English

Why?

I get using a spell checker. I can see the utility in running a quick grammar check. Showing it to a friend and asking for feedback is usually a good idea.

But why would you trust a hallucinogenic plagiarism machine to "clean" your ideas?

It did not feel off at all. I read every single word and that is all that counts.

I think what you are getting wrong is thinking that the reader cares about your effort. The reader doesn't care about your effort. It doesn't matter if it took you 12 seconds or 5 days to write a piece of content.

The key thing is people reading the entirety of it. If it is AI slop, I just automatically skim to the end and nothing registers in my head. The combination of em dashes and the sentence structure just makes my mind tune it out.

So, your thesis is correct. If you put in the custom visualization and put in the effort, folks will read it. But not because they think you put in the effort. They don't care. But because right now AI produces generic fluff that's overly perfectly correct. That's why I skip most LinkedIn posts as well. Like, I personally don't care if it's AI or not. But mentally, I just automatically discount and skip it. So, your effort basically interrupts that automatic pattern recognition.