Two guests, working in completely different corners of the market, arrived at the same uncomfortable standard. Neither framed it as a moral argument. It happens to be one anyway.
Two Guests, One Uncomfortable Standard
Drew Dorenfest of Client Magnet CRM is describing what earns a citation from an AI system. Bruce Ashford of The Ashford Agency is describing what happens to writing when everyone lets a machine do it. Put together, they describe a single discipline: be checkable, and sound like yourself.
Machine-Written Copy All Blurs Together
A note on sourcing before the quote. In the recording Ashford’s sentence about AI-written script is interrupted mid-thought and picked up again after the host speaks, so we are not presenting it as one continuous line. What he says clearly, in his own turn, is this:
“you can tell when something’s written by a machine. And now that everybody is doing their writing with machines, it just, it just all blurs together.”
— Bruce Ashford, The Ashford Agency
Ashford is not an AI sceptic on principle. He has “authored nine books” and “ghostwritten 15,” and he is candid that even “working really hard with AI to get it to write really top shelf stuff, it just can’t do it.” His conclusion is a division of labour rather than a ban: AI “can help me in the drafting and editing stage, but you’re going to have to have a skilled human eye.”
And he accepts the volume pressure honestly: “we’re going to have to use AI to write. Cause we’ve got to produce so much stuff” — but then “the human element has to be very, very involved at every stage.”
Citing Sources As A Form Of Honesty
Dorenfest’s version is mechanical, and it lands in the same place:
“The key to getting cited is to cite your sources. Link to IRS.gov, link to the tax research that backs your claims. When crawlers come and cross-reference your information against those sources and verify them, they go: okay, this company is legitimate.”
— Drew Dorenfest, Client Magnet CRM
What makes this more than a tactic is what it forces. You cannot cite a source for a claim you invented. Adopting the practice is, in effect, adopting a rule against writing things you cannot support — which is a standard most of us would say we already hold and rather fewer of us apply to a services page.
Writing In Your Own Voice At Scale
Practitioner guidance. The parts of your writing a machine cannot supply are the specifics only you have: the job that went wrong and what you did about it, the number from your own books, the customer’s actual words, the thing you used to believe and no longer do.
A workable pattern is to let the tool handle structure and tidying, and to reserve every concrete particular for yourself. If a paragraph contains no fact that could only have come from you, it is the paragraph Ashford says blurs.
What This Costs And Why It Is Worth It
It costs time, and it costs some claims. Sourcing every assertion means discovering that a few of your favourite lines are not supportable, and softening them.
What you get is a body of work that survives being checked — by a reader, by a crawler, or by a prospective customer who is trying to decide whether you are serious. Dorenfest’s own measure is worth keeping in view: he cares about conversions, because those are the thing a business owner can actually feel.
More on this in if AI gets your business wrong and don’t fear the tools.
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