This week I have a hot take.

Pointing out that someone used AI to write their content is the new grammar policing.

And grammar policing has never once made anyone a better writer. It just makes the person doing it feel superior for about four minutes.

Nobody has ever died from a spelling mistake. Nobody’s business collapsed because of an em-dash. And nobody is going to lose a client because an algorithm suspects their caption was AI-assisted. The people scanning your content for “tells” are not your customers. They are procrastinating.

We’ve Been Here Before

When computers replaced typewriters, someone absolutely complained about it. The letters were too uniform. It did not feel like real work. You know that meeting happened. And those people eventually had to learn WordPerfect anyway.

Then the internet showed up, and businesses insisted their customers were not online. They held out. And then they built websites anyway.

Then social media showed up, and a whole generation of businesses refused to see that attention was shifting. They held out for twenty years. And now they all have accounts and are wondering how to hire an influencer. 

This is that moment. Again. Except the window to get started is shorter this time.

AI for Small Business Marketing Is Not a Status Test

We are already living in an AI world.

Somewhere out there is a business owner who has never opened ChatGPT, is not sure what it even does, and is already stretched too thin to learn one more thing. That is not failure. That is just Tuesday when you wear every hat.

Nobody is standing over your shoulder every time you stuff a receipt in a drawer instead of uploading it to QuickBooks. We all have the thing we have not gotten to yet. AI is just the one people have decided to be loud about.

Personally, when I see AI writing patterns, I’m proud of people for using it.

The Only Question Worth Asking

If someone publishes something that was clearly AI-written, the only question worth asking is whether the information is good. Whether it helps the person reading it. Because if the answer is yes, the rest is just noise.

Using AI well does not make you better than someone who just opened it for the first time. Writing your own content does not make you better than someone who needed help getting the idea out. Nobody in this is ahead enough to be handing out grades.

Can we all just agree to focus on our own stuff?