Tools Don’t Create Perspective

There’s a growing cottage industry on LinkedIn devoted to spotting AI-written content. People trade lists of tells—emojis, bullet points, excessive em dashes—as if the problem is detection. It isn’t. Those tells are just symptoms. The real issue is that a lot of what’s being published has no point of view, regardless of how it was produced.

I came to this topic the same way many posts start: with an observation and a vague sense that something felt off. Using ChatGPT didn’t give me the idea. It helped me sharpen it. Through iteration, the problem became clearer—not that AI is writing content, but that it’s being used as a substitute for thinking. When that happens, the output is predictable: fluent, tidy, and empty.

This failure mode isn’t new. Long before AI, we were already summarizing conference talks, management books, and other people’s blog posts. The same ideas get rephrased, lightly personalized, and pushed back into the feed. What’s usually missing isn’t information—it’s interpretation. What did this mean in your context? What broke when you tried it? What trade-off did you accept? Without that, the content might be accurate, but it isn’t useful.

AI can help refine what’s already there. It can clarify language, tighten an argument, and expose weak spots. But it can’t be you. It won’t supply judgment, experience, or accountability. If you don’t bring something authentic and specific to the page, no amount of tooling will make it interesting.