The Pros & Cons of Giving Your Brain to a Machine

Read time: 5 minutes

Hey, welcome back.

Last week, I talked about the ups and downs of my fitness journey, and how it's making me a better dad in the process. You can read that (and all past issues, here)

Today I want to talk about AI. And I want to say something that might annoy a few people.

Four Years In And We're Still Talking About Potential

We're four years into the AI era now. And I find it fascinating that most of the conversation is still about what AI "will" do. What it "could" do. What it "might" unlock.

Not what it's actually doing right now. Not what the measurable return on investment looks like. Not whether the businesses built entirely on top of it are making money.

Because if that was the conversation, it would be a much shorter one. Most AI companies are burning cash. Most AI implementations inside businesses haven't been properly measured for ROI. And most of the people posting about how AI has transformed their workflow have never actually sat down and compared the output to what they were producing before.

We're in a cycle where everyone is talking about the future to avoid having an honest conversation about the present.

A Rant I Found On Reddit

I was scouring Reddit the other day looking for AI breakthroughs (which, for the record, are mostly things we've already heard about repackaged with a new headline). And instead of a breakthrough, I found a rant from a copywriter that stopped me mid-scroll. Here's what they said, paraphrased:

They started using AI heavily in 2023 and 2024. It helped them crank out work at a pace they'd never hit before. 25+ hour-long VSLs. They thought it was amazing. Then their hit rate dropped. Badly. For one client in particular, they decided to write a VSL completely by hand. That one did 10 million in revenue.

Their conclusion: AI is fast. But fast and good are different things. And the more you rely on it, the more it trains your brain to accept mediocre output as good enough because it arrived quickly.

I think about that a lot.

You Can Spot AI Writing In About Three Seconds

This is what nobody talks about. AI doesn't just produce generic content. It produces content with very specific patterns that your audience is already learning to recognise, even if they can't name them.

Every insight gets framed as a dramatic reframe. "It's not about working harder. It's about working smarter." AI does this constantly because it's been trained to think this structure sounds profound. One of those per piece is fine. When every paragraph is built that way, it reads like a motivational poster factory.

Everything comes in threes. "Focus. Discipline. Consistency." "Build trust. Build value. Build community." AI loves the rule of three so much it will stack tricolons back to back until your eyes glaze over. Real people don't think in perfectly packaged trinities.

AI loves the word "quietly." Quietly revolutionising. Quietly reshaping. Quietly transforming. It uses this word to make ordinary things sound secretly important. Once you notice it, you'll see it everywhere.

Every explanation gets turned into a false surprise. "Not because they were smarter. Not because they had more resources. But because they showed up." This structure makes every point feel like a reveal, even when the point is completely obvious. Before AI, people simply did not write like this at scale.

And then there's the fake honesty. "I'll be honest." "Here's what most people miss." "Here's the thing." These phrases manufacture a sense of transparency while saying nothing transparent at all.

Your readers are picking up on this. Maybe not consciously. But something feels off when they read AI-generated content. It lacks a specific voice. It lacks surprise. Everything is structured the same way and it all has this strange, polished emptiness to it.

Speed Is Seductive

When something is fast, your brain wants to believe it's also good. You conflate the two. You get a draft back in thirty seconds and part of you immediately assigns it more value than it deserves because of how quickly it appeared.

And over time, your own standards start to slip. You stop noticing the generic phrasing. You stop catching the patterns I just described. You stop questioning whether the thing you just produced is actually as sharp as what you used to write by hand. Because it's done. And it's 10am. And you've got twelve other things to do.

That's the danger. AI doesn't make you worse overnight. It does it gradually, by making you comfortable with output you would have rejected two years ago.

Where AI Actually Earns Its Keep

I use AI. I'm not against it. There are things it's genuinely useful for.

Research. Summarising long documents. First-pass analysis on data. Brainstorming when you're stuck. Short-form copy where the reader already knows what they want and you just need to communicate it clearly.

For all of that, AI saves time and the quality holds up.

Where it falls apart is anything that requires a real human perspective. The kind of writing that comes from someone who has actually felt the thing they're describing. The kind of brand voice that took years to develop. The kind of storytelling that makes someone forward an email to a friend because it made them feel understood.

AI can produce something that looks like that on the surface. But it doesn't land the same way. And if your audience has been reading your stuff long enough, they'll notice the shift even if they can't explain why.

The Heights Parallel

This might seem like a stretch but I see a direct parallel to the supplement industry.

When Joel and I started Heights, the whole market was built on speed and shortcuts. Source cheap ingredients. Slap a label on it. Run some ads. Ship volume. The margins were great and the products looked legitimate from the outside.

But they didn't work. The ingredients were underdosed. The formulations weren't backed by research. The products sat on shelves for years losing potency. Everything about the process was optimised for speed and cost, and the person taking the supplement was the one who paid the price.

We went the other way. 18 months to develop one product. Sustainably sourced ingredients. Clinical trials. Blood tests. Peer-reviewed research. It was slower, more expensive, and for years nobody noticed the difference.

They notice now. We just became the first consumer health company accepted into the Parliamentary & Scientific Committee. That didn't happen because we moved fast. It happened because we refused to cut corners even when the faster path was sitting right there.

I see the same dynamic playing out with AI content. It's fast. It scales. And from the outside, it looks like the real thing. But is it actually working? Has anyone checked?

The Measurement Problem

The people who are loudest about AI transforming their business are almost never measuring whether it's actually doing that.

They'll talk about how many pieces of content they produce per week now. They'll talk about their new automated workflows. They'll post screenshots of their agents doing things.

What they won't share is whether their conversion rates improved. Whether their customer lifetime value changed. Whether the content they're producing is actually performing better than what they were doing before. Because most of them haven't looked.

If you're using AI in your business and you haven't done a proper before-and-after on the metrics that matter, you might be optimising for speed while your quality erodes underneath you. And you might not find out until someone who's still doing the work by hand starts taking your customers.

What I'd Say To You

Use AI where it makes sense. Research. Admin. First drafts of things where voice doesn't matter. There's real value there and ignoring it would be stubborn.

But protect the things that make your work yours. The perspective you've built over years. The way you tell stories. The connection your audience has with the way you communicate. Those things took time to build and they're worth more than any efficiency gain.

The next time AI hands you something in thirty seconds, read it out loud. Does it sound like you? Does it sound like anyone? Or does it sound like that same polished, pattern-heavy, emotionally vacant voice that everything on the internet is starting to sound like?

If it sounds like you, ship it. If it doesn't, write it yourself.

To doing the work,

Dan

P.S. I'm not against AI. I'm against shortcuts that masquerade as progress. Always have been. Whether it's supplements or software, the question is the same: is this actually good, or is it just fast?

Humankind by Rutger Bregman on Audible.

If the news doom cycle is starting to make you lose faith in humanity, like it is me... This book will help restore some of that

Read Here

All In Podcast

The world's first trillionaire, etc

Listen Here

Toy Story 5

Took my daughter to her first imax Waterloo trip and despite 90% of the laughs and tears coming from parents my age, the kids enjoyed it too!

Watch Here

A 2020 study published in Emotion found that people who learned to accept their “non-ideal emotional states”, including low motivation, low energy, and neutral days, experienced significantly higher overall well-being and lower stress.

The key insight: self-acceptance amplifies emotional resilience, while self-judgment weakens it.

📌 Quick Takeaway →

Your average days aren’t failures; they’re emotional training grounds.
When you stop punishing yourself for being human, everything in your life compounds faster.

→ Link to study

In my goal to help more entrepreneurs/people who are looking to level up their careers, I've just started taking 1-1 consulting calls (only 1 a week)

Why book a call? Some of my expertise/success:

I've built 6 startups. 3 fails, 1 win, and 2 still going.
E-Commerce: Heights - with revenue over $40M a year.
Community: Foundrs, one of the UK's top founder communities
Podcasting: Leaders Media - Bootstrapped to #1 in business and 10M downloads
Health/Mental Health: Overcame depression, insomnia, burnout and anxiety in pursuit of success
Angel Investing: I've invested in over 100 companies
Personal Brand: Over 400,000 followers across social
Hear me on Diary of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

So if you're interested in booking a session with me to talk all things business or building a personal brand, book for 30-minutes or 45-minutes. (limited spots).

Book a Call with Dan