AI Content: Separating Fact from Fiction
Since GPT showed up, everyone suddenly became an "AI teacher." Here is the one filter I use to tell useful AI writing from engagement bait.
Since GPT showed up, everyone suddenly became an "AI teacher."
"These 5 tools you MUST use in 2026." "This automation setup or your business is dead." Comment "guide" and they will DM you a generic PDF nobody has actually tested.
Is all AI content useless? No. But a lot of it is optimized for the feed, not for people shipping real work.
The one filter that still works
People who have genuinely done the work mention a specific error, a specific number, what broke. That is hard to fake, because faking it requires having actually failed at something first.
Did they build it and watch it break, or are they just telling you that you should?
This is a platform problem, not just an AI problem
LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube all optimize for engagement, not accuracy. A confidently wrong claim beats an honest "I tried this, it did not work," every time.
That incentive shape is why tool-of-the-week threads spread faster than postmortems. The postmortem is more useful. It just looks worse in a feed.
What I look for before I trust a post
- A concrete failure mode: what broke, under what conditions
- A number that came from measuring, not guessing
- Tradeoffs — when the approach is the wrong choice
- Enough detail that you could try to reproduce it
If none of those are present, I treat the post as marketing until proven otherwise.
Useful AI writing is usually quieter than viral AI writing. It sounds like someone who shipped, broke something, and came back with scars. That is the content worth keeping.