How AI is killing your Personal Brand

Everyone has a personal brand, and yes, that includes you.

When you hear "personal brand," you probably picture big creators with a million-plus followers. That’s not what I mean.

Your personal brand is what determines the split-second reaction your name triggers when someone gets a message from you. The tiny bit of excitement or disappointment someone feels before they even open it.

You experience this all the time with other people. For example, when you get shared Instagram Reels or videos from a friend. There’s the one who sends you ten things a week that you never open, and then there’s the one friend whose messages you reply to quickly every time.

That subconscious scorecard people keep about you and the quality of info you share is your personal brand.

And the way you’re using AI is degrading your personal brand, which impacts you more than you realize.

And unfortunately, most people have no idea what’s actually at stake…

The distrust AI slop creates is expensive. 

The second someone notices your email or post is AI-generated, they discredit you.

Maybe you saved time, but you lost trust.

And this is getting noticed publicly.

A memo recently went out from inside Leila and Alex Hormozi’s company, Acqusition dot com which is worth 100’s of millions, it says…

"I'm going to be direct: I am SO sick of reading AI slop. Especially in memos. So I would like to explain how you can immediately tell whether a memo is written by AI or a human.”

People are sick of slop, and when they see it from you once, they’re skeptical of everything that comes after.

And it's not just trust you’re losing. Because in business, trust = value = money.

BetterUp Labs teamed up with Stanford's Social Media Lab and put numbers on it. They call it "workslop": AI output that looks finished but shoves the actual work of fact-checking and interpreting onto whoever receives it.

40% of employees say they got workslop in the last month.

Which, based on their estimates, for a 10,000-person company, costs over $9M a year.

LinkedIn is acknowledging the issue, too. On July 30^th , they rolled out a button that lets people flag a post as "AI slop." And I don’t think they’re wrong to do it🤷🏻‍♂️

People notice when you send them AI emails or posts. They might not tell you, but they will definitely remember. And trust is even harder than money to earn back once it’s gone.

How to know if you're sending out slop

Before you share a post or send an email that AI helped you with, run it through three quick tests.

1. The read-time test. The co-founder of Hello Patient said it perfectly: "If it takes the recipient longer to consume it than it took you to create it, it is likely slop." You (AI) generated it in ten seconds, but the reader spends five minutes decoding it? That’s not good.

2. The specificity test. Does it contain anything only YOU could have written? A real name, number, or experience that really happened? A message that could have come from anyone came from nobody. Lack of specificity is slop.

3. The polish test. This one is the opposite of what you’d think. You don’t want your writing perfect. The roughness is proof a human was there.

If this isn’t your first time reading my newsletter, you’re probably already aware of these AI writing pitfalls. The real hack comes in making a filter that checks your work for you.

Maintain your personal brand with an anti-slop filter.

You don’t have to use AI less. You just have to use it at the right time, and a great place to start is a filter at the end of any workflow to sign off on things before they’re sent.

To do that:

1. Write two lists. A bar and a tell-list.

THE BAR LIST (what good looks like)

Pull 3 of your best pieces. The posts or messages people actually responded to. Write down what made them work.

THE TELL-LIST (your banned patterns)

Make a list of obviously AI phrases. According to the Hormozi memo, that was words/phrases like "delve" or "in today's fast-paced world." Add your own.

If you don’t know where to look, on Wikipedia there is a page called “Signs of AI Writing” that you can copy and paste into. Here’s an example of me adding a word for the “tell-list” to my team internally. Sage now knows…don’t use “clocked an email”.

2. Run AI as a verifier. You create first. Then you hand it over with one job: flag issues, but don't rewrite. Make a prompt like this: "Point at anything that reads like slop against my lists."

3. Verify that it works. Before you trust it to judge anything, feed it those 3 best pieces again and see what it flags. If it can't tell your good work from slop, it can't protect your personal brand.

Those three moves get you a filter. But a truly helpful system goes further and provides you with data to track over time.

Turn the filter into a score skill.

Mine runs in stages: the bar, the tell-lists, a judging panel, a verdict, and finally a receipt. With all these working in order, I can see exactly why something passed or failed. I ran my own work through it. My 18 posted scripts score between 81 and 95 on my own slop scale. A raw AI draft scored a 0.

There is a lot here, so if you want a guide that walks you through every step I covered in this newsletter, click here, where you’ll use my BuildPartner.ai plugin to get you all setup for free.

The more AI gets used, the more skeptical everyone will be. And that means your personal brand is more valuable than ever.

Every message you send adds to or detracts from your credibility.

So put a filter between AI and everything that has your name on it. Create your own work first. Use AI to verify it second.

BTW - Life Update!! I just proposed to my now fiancé in Florence. I always tell people you have to go to Piazzale Michelangelo. So it felt right to bring Jess there for her first time and make it extra special. I'm on my flight back after 10 days in Italy. A lot of wine, a lot of pasta, and a lot of good vibes. Friendly reminder that enjoying life is something every personal brand needs.

Cheers, see y’all in the next newsletter.

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