I'm going to do the thing I ask everyone else to do, which is tell the truth about my own numbers.
This spring we leaned on AI to produce a run of articles for this site. The pitch to myself was the same one you've told yourself: more content, less time, who's going to know. So we shipped. And this week, when I finally sat down and read every piece the way a reader would, here is what I found.
One article was published with no body at all — live on the site, headline only, nothing underneath. Two articles argued the same point, on the same topic, published the same day, quietly competing with each other. And running through the rest were statistics that sounded authoritative and turned out to be invented. "Twenty-seven percent of pipeline deals are sandbagged." "Reps spend twenty-two percent of their time travelling." We traced them down. The first appears to come from a single vendor blog citing no source. The second is real — except the twenty-two percent is selling time, not travel. The number was confident, specific, and wrong.
That's the thing about AI slop. It doesn't read as bad. It reads as fine. It has the cadence of expertise without the substance, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous, because nobody catches fine. A reader doesn't bounce off a fabricated stat. They absorb it, they trust you a little less without knowing why, and they don't come back.
I've spent thirty years arguing that the gap between who you are and who you said you'd be has to be visible, or it grows. I let it grow on my own platform. The fix wasn't to fire the tool. The tool is staying — used well, it's the most powerful leverage a small team has ever had. The fix was the thing that was missing the whole time: a standard the tool has to clear before anything ships.
So here's ours now, in writing. Every statistic gets a named, linkable source or it gets cut. Every piece gets read end to end by a human who'd put their name on it. AI writes the first draft; it never writes the last one. The same rule I run my body and my business by, finally applied to the words.
That's not an apology for using AI. It's an argument for using it like a professional. The container was missing. Now it's built.
George Leith is the founder of Evolved Pros and author of EVOLVED, available for pre-order at evolvedpros.com/book.
