Episode 27

Be Human: Why Authenticity Crushes Lazy AI

Unfiltered & Unshakable episode 27: Be Human: Why Authenticity Crushes Lazy AI

The one thing AI can never replicate is you — your laugh, your stumble, your unscripted take. Steve makes the case for radical authenticity in a feed full of generated content.

🎯 Key Takeaways

  • AI tools amplify your work — they should never replace your voice
  • The moments that connect are never the polished ones — they’re the human ones
  • A laugh, a stumble, a real opinion: these are your competitive moat against automation
  • Voice notes and off-the-cuff videos outperform scripted content because people feel the difference
  • Use AI as a tool. Show up as a human. That’s the whole strategy.

📋 Show Notes

Steve’s relationship with AI is real — he uses it constantly, and he loves pointing out when people use it as a crutch to disappear behind. The irony of AI is that the better it gets at generating content, the more valuable genuine human expression becomes.

Your stumbles, your unpolished takes, your honest reactions — those are increasingly rare in a feed drowning in generated text. The tools are there to help you scale the human stuff, not to replace it. Send the voice note. Tell the messy story. Let people hear you. That’s what builds something real.

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    📝 Full Transcript — Episode 27click to expand

    We talked about this a few episodes ago, and it’s about AI and AI content and the algorithm sometimes even favoring AI because the algorithm loves volume. But at the end of the day, people, people love things that are real. And, you know, look, it could be anything. It could be an off-the-cuff story from your life. That’ll smoke a dozen AI, 10 times your growth carousel posts. I mean, how many have you seen of that today?

    How many lead gen content posts have you seen in the last 24 hours? Promising you with our tool, we will create for you massive lead gen opportunities. Look, I’ve got an email that seems to grab all those. It’s a throwaway I’ve been using for years. I’m signed on to every list from every heavy hitter and every small hitter on the planet. It gets hundreds of emails a day.

    If I told you that the ebb and flow was leaning towards auto-generated or minimally invested AI content, just promoting lead gen and promoting getting in front of people, promoting AI call bots, promoting all this slop, just this. Look, we all look at things a little bit differently. I’m not anti-AI. Look, I use AI even for this podcast to clean up the vocals because it’s a lot easier than spending an hour audio engineering a seven-minute or six-minute audio clip. So, sure, I run it through an AI voice cleaner. It doesn’t change the words that I’m saying.

    It doesn’t change my voice. It doesn’t change my tone. It cleans up my lisp and it maybe takes away some of the vocal pops and normalizes my volume because I am energetic and I move around while I’m talking and making these. I can’t just sit still, so I’m moving and there’s fluctuations. AI can be a wonderful tool in many things. And even in music, people are arguing these days about the Suno app and how AI is destroying the music business.

    The reality is it’s an amazing tool for stem separation. For anybody who actually does, like, work in a DAW and is into the audio world, you know, for stem separation, it’s a fantastic tool. Not going to write a rock album with it, though, because it’s going to sound pedestrian and every song’s going to sound the same. And they really do. And look, I’m a Suno user just because I was curious. I was making joke stuff about the Knicks players.

    I was literally making dozens of songs, 80s rock-style songs about the Knicks that were making me and my family crack up and laugh. I usually do it during the games when they’re winning when they’re losing i’m throwing things at the wall like the last couple of the last four games but that’s neither here nor there when this post it might be more it might be it might the streak might be snapped let’s hope. End of the day ai is always going to be here at this point so you have to take the human element of yourself and start promoting that more you know. You want to take a voice note from the car? That’s gold. You know, stutter, laugh, drop a curse word if it fits.

    That’s the stuff that’s going to stick every time. Something that feels real. Something that feels human. The lazy AI is just flooding our feed constantly with that soulless slop. I yell it out at my computer all the time. I’ll scroll through LinkedIn and see like five in a row and be like, oh man, F me.

    Can’t they just stop? The real way to win and for you to win is by being unapologetically you and that’s something i’ve been saying for years literally was that the hero text on my my website for four years be unapologetically you you know imperfections and all right it’s it’s your imperfections are what makes you unique it’s what makes you somebody to listen to it makes you something that has a grip or a grab to it you know it’s. It’s easy to mail it in. It’s easy to use ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and Grok and, you know, Nano Banana and all these things. But how many Nano Banana images have you seen online? I use it for episode images for the website and, you know, screwing around.

    That’s pretty much it. I’m not going to rely on it heavy. I actually drew a hilarious, you know, I drew it in Procreate on my iPad, like a stick figure colored in type of something a kid would do in grade school, for New Year’s with a 2026 and a boat with a fish hook and some crappy fish drawing around. Yeah, you know, it was absolute garbage, the image. But I made it because I thought it was funny. I was sitting on my couch.

    I made it the day before, and I was like, I’ll post this on New Year’s, and that was that. So look, the riff of the day about AI and about you being you as a person is that robots can write words, but humans drop truth bombs. Every time you’ve got a, you know, as they call it, a microphone moment, a pipe bomb moment with the microphone, and you see they drop the mic. Those moments are always human. You can’t manufacture those with AI in a way that’s really going to move people and shake them to their core. They might say, oh yeah, nice, bro, good.

    But you’re never going to move anybody. You’re never going to affect change in anybody. And you’re never going to make a difference if all you do is rely on AI, especially if it’s just a generic AI like a chat GPT, and you’re not leveraging something like a digital mind where you’re feeding it thousands of lines and millions of words of content of your own. If you’re doing that, we could argue it a little more. But when you’re just literally mailing it in. It’s just not it.

    You know, the AI is just not going to be that type of thing where you’re going to get a massive reaction and really change things up. So, look, that’s it for today. I totally forgot to do the riff of the day. You know, it’s not even on my note screen here, hilariously enough. I completely omitted to write the riff of the day, so I’m going to make one up as we go. The riff of the day is real simple.

    Don’t rely on AI. Rely on the person that you see in the mirror. And with that, I will leave you. Today was another episode of Unfiltered and Unshakable. I’m Steve Lichtman, and just thank you for being here.

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