The Age of Artificial Authority (& How to Stand Out In It)

By Dan Sanchez · Episode published

AI polish is becoming cheap. The way to stand out is to put your experience, personality, values, and original thinking into the work before AI helps you shape it.

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When everyone sounds smart, your experience has to show

AI is making polished content abundant. LinkedIn posts are crisp, websites are persuasive, and a generated answer can sound like a PhD wrote it. That changes the problem for anyone selling expertise: being able to produce information is no longer enough. People need a reason to believe the person behind it.

The answer is not to hide from AI. It is to stop letting AI do your thinking. Bring it a rough idea, a lived example, a disagreement, or a question you have actually wrestled with. Then use it to shape and extend the material. If the model supplies the substance, your content becomes interchangeable with everyone else’s.

Use your voice as raw material

Ken’s practical suggestion is simple: verbally vomit into the tool. Turn on the microphone and talk through the idea in the way you naturally communicate. That gives AI your phrasing, priorities, and odd turns of thought. A polished draft can still be useful, but it should be editing your thinking rather than replacing it.

Personality matters because generated writing tends to repeat its own habits. The familiar em dash, semicolon, and “not just this, but this” construction can make the source obvious, but those tells will improve. Authenticity cannot depend on catching punctuation. It has to come from substance.

Experience is the stronger test. AI can tell you everything about the Sistine Chapel, but it has never smelled the room. It can produce a marketing plan, but it has not lived through the failed launch, the difficult client, or the decision that changed your method. Those experiences give you discernment: the ability to see which answer is generic, wrong, or useful for the actual situation.

That is also why real people still win product decisions. A shelf full of pre-workout containers may have equally polished promises. I chose Jocko’s because a real person’s experience and values made the product easier to trust. The same principle applies to your offer. Your stories let people assess the values behind your claims.

Create something only you could make

The human edge is not merely a refusal to use automation. It is the act of creating. Give AI your rough draft, your point of view, or the problem you have personally encountered, and let it help you build. My November music experiment worked because the ideas and nostalgia came from me, even though AI and Suno carried much of the execution.

That distinction protects you from the faceless-content trap. A generic review with stock footage may be efficient, but it is easy to ignore. When I want a product review, I look for someone who actually bought and used the thing. Their evidence gives me a reason to care.

As AI spreads, trust becomes the scarce resource. Build it by publishing your actual thinking, your experiences, your values, and the work those things produce. Your content can be polished by a machine. Its authority has to come from a person.