Hello, word lovers.
Here's what's in this month's letter:
- Why brands are paying to look imperfect — and what they're still missing
- The writing practice that begins with your own story
- Three sentences from a book that changed how I listen
Let's get into it.
The Scramble to Seem Human Is Missing the Point
What happened:
- After years of AI-generated content flooding social feeds and inboxes, a sharp backlash is reshaping how brands and creators work together
- Early 2026 saw major brands — Equinox, Almond Breeze — run campaigns explicitly mocking AI content and positioning themselves as human and real
- Influencer agencies now report brands requesting imperfections in creator content: an unmade bed, dishes in the sink, a shirt that hasn't been ironed
- Consumer preference for AI creator content has dropped from 60% in 2023 to 26% today
- Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri released a public memo in December calling on platforms to label AI content and "surface credibility signals about who's posting"
Read the full Digiday article →
Diane's Take
In 2008, Zhang Yimou directed the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Thousands of performers moved in perfect synchrony. The world watched and thought: China has a lot of people.
Yimou saw something else. He saw the most abundant resource available and asked what he could build if he stopped treating it as a constraint and started treating it as a canvas.
AI has done something similar to content. Intelligence is abundant now. Competent writing is abundant. A professional-sounding paragraph, a well-structured email, a polished case study — none of these prove anything anymore. They are table stakes.
So brands are panicking. They're asking creators to leave the dishes in the sink. They're running ads that mock their own industry. They're scrambling to prove they're human.
I don't think that's the right question.
The question isn't whether your content is human-made. The question is whether it's real.
Real means: you were there. You made the decision. You learned the lesson. You carried the failure. You remember the exact moment things changed.
AI can write about resilience. It cannot endure. AI can write about failure. It cannot fail. AI can describe the moment a client called to say thank you. It was not on that call.
The organizations that earn trust — not just attention, but trust — are the ones that stop racing to label their content human and start filling it with things only they could know.
The share of consumers who now prefer AI-generated creator content, down from 60% in 2023, according to research from influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, cited in Digiday.
In three years, the appetite for synthetic content fell by more than half. What filled the gap wasn't a return to any particular format. It was a return to specificity. To the moment no one could have invented.
When your client can't give you a story, write your own first.
Ghostwriting has a quiet problem: clients run busy. They delegate the intake form to an assistant. They assume you can fill in the gaps. They trust you to sound like them before they've shown you what that sounds like.
What I keep coming back to is this — I spent years in sales making a hundred calls a day while a boss timed and recorded every one. Those calls taught me what it means to be accountable to a voice, to a moment, to the truth of what actually happened. That experience lives in me. And when I write for someone else, I'm looking for the same thing in them.
The practice that keeps helping: writing my own story first. Not the polished version. The one where I was nervous, or wrong, or had to figure it out in real time. When you know what it costs to produce something true from your own life, you recognize the same material in someone else's. You know which question to ask. And you know how to wait.
Try it this week. Write one true moment from your own experience — not a lesson, a moment — and notice how long it takes to get there. That's what you're asking of every client who trusts you with their story.
Something Found
From Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators —
"Every conversation is really one of three conversations. Do you want to be helped? Do you want to be hugged? Or do you want to be heard?"
It stopped me because it's so simple it should be obvious. And somehow it isn't. I think about how many writing briefs and client calls would go differently if I asked that first. Before the intake form. Before the questions. Just: which conversation do we actually need to have?
Your organization has a real story.
The organizations I work with have real stories. Moments that changed things. People who stayed because a letter made them feel seen. Donors who came back because someone took the time to say what the gift actually did.
The challenge is rarely that the story doesn't exist. It's that no one has had the time to find it and write it down.
That's what I do. I write customer journey content for nonprofits, health practices, and essential-service businesses — retention emails, brand voice guides, and editorial strategy that sound like the organization, not a template. Content built from the things only they could know.
If your organization has a real story and hasn't found the words for it yet, I'd love to help.
That's this month.
Which conversation do you usually need — helped, hugged, or heard? Hit reply and tell me. I'm genuinely curious.
Until next month,
— Diane