I don’t think the problem is AI.
I think the problem is that people are amplifying identities they never fully clarified in the first place.
AI just makes it louder.
Same with social media.
Same with marketing.
Same with “personal branding.”
Same with content.
If you don’t know who and what you are before amplification begins, eventually everything starts sounding vaguely like everyone else.
Not because people are lazy.
Because they skipped the upstream decisions.
The human ones.
- Ambiguity.
- Curiosity.
- Tension.
- Misunderstanding.
- Clarification.
- Recognition.
- Discovery.
Those things used to take time.
Now we rush past them trying to arrive at certainty as fast as possible.
But certainty is often where understanding dies.
That’s why “know yourself before you brand yourself” matters so much to me.
Because branding without self-knowledge turns into performance.
And performance is exhausting.
The people who become unmistakable usually aren’t trying harder to sound unique.
They’ve simply become coherent enough that everything reinforces the same signal.
Which may explain why I’ve become increasingly interested in creating spaces where meaning unfolds in real time instead of arriving prepackaged.
That’s where my Truth Tastes Funny podcast is headed.