We are drowning in a sea of synthesized expertise. Anyone with an internet connection and a prompt window can suddenly position themselves as a seasoned authority on complex business dynamics, flooding journalists with technically proficient but entirely hollow commentary.
This is the harsh reality at the center of a recent discussion with Rob Waugh on what still works in public relations. The internet is heavily saturated with fake experts relying on artificial intelligence to mimic authority. For marketing and PR leaders, this presents a dangerous trap. The natural temptation is to fight fire with fire by using these exact same tools to scale up your own content production. If you can instantly generate fifty pitch angles or blog posts instead of five, the math suggests you should do it.
But that math is fundamentally flawed. Playing the volume game with synthetic content is a guaranteed way to erode your brand credibility. Journalists, partners, and sophisticated buyers can spot this artificial polish from a mile away. They are completely exhausted by it. When you strip away the novelty of generative tools, you quickly realize that AI removes the friction from content creation. In fundamental economics, when something is frictionless and infinitely abundant, its value drops to zero.
The Premium on Human Friction
This brings us to a critical strategic pivot. Genuine human originality is now the absolute most powerful differentiator you have in your marketing arsenal. If your executive’s thought leadership sounds perfectly structured, vaguely agreeable, and devoid of sharp edges, it gets ignored. It sounds exactly like a machine wrote it.
What actually captures attention right now is what is hardest to fake: earned experience. We need to lean into the specific, occasionally messy perspectives that algorithms cannot hallucinate. A bold opinion based on a recent strategic failure. A contrarian take on a widely accepted market trend. A highly specific operational insight that only someone who has spent ten years in the trenches would know.
When everyone else is sanding down their rough edges to produce mass-market AI commentary, your competitive advantage lies in your unique human friction. Trust is built through authenticity. And authenticity requires a willingness to sound like a real person with real stakes in the game.
Stop measuring your communications teams on the sheer volume of output or the number of generic pitches sent. Audit your current messaging and actively strip away the synthetic gloss. Force your executives to bring their unvarnished, sharply defined opinions to the table, and make unmistakable human originality your absolute baseline for publication.
Source: AI, Fake Experts, and What Still Works In PR with Rob Waugh
