What nobody says out loud about AI: it can’t actually create anything. It can only reference what already exists. Every word it spits out is, by definition, built on someone else’s work — pieced together from the millions of articles, blogs, books and tweets it was trained on.
So when someone tells me they’re using AI to ‘write’ their content, what they’re really telling me is that they’re publishing a remix of everyone else’s content and slapping their logo on it.
Which is fine, I suppose, until it starts plagiarising you specifically.
The article that showed up three months later
Late last year, we wrote an article for a client in the property and finance space. As we always do, we sat down with them, interviewed them, pulled out the specific examples and stories that only they could tell, and turned it into something genuinely theirs. We published it in August.
In November, our client spotted a LinkedIn article from a competitor in the same industry. Same structure. Same flow. Same specific example. Identical lists. The kind of ‘identical’ you can’t hand-wave away as coincidence — because the example was drawn from our client’s actual experience. There’s no universe in which a different business, with different clients, in a different patch of the same industry, lived through the same anecdote.
And it had the tell-tale signs of an AI rewrite — the slightly clunky reordering’s, the synonyms swapped in where they didn’t quite fit, the sentences that had clearly been told to ‘rephrase this’ rather than ‘think about this.’
Whether the copywriter copied it themselves and ran it through AI to launder it, or whether they fed AI a brief and AI quietly served up our client’s article as the foundation, we’ll never know. The result was the same: someone else’s content, lightly repackaged, published as original work.
To their credit, when our client raised it with theirs, the response was immediate and apologetic. The article came down. No drama, no lawyers, no harm done. But this is becoming more and more common. We see it constantly now. And most of the time, the original author never finds out.
The strikingly familiar newsletter
Over a year ago, I wrote an article. I was pretty proud of it. Recently, a newsletter from a competitor in the marketing industry landed in my inbox with an article that was — let’s say — strikingly similar. Same idea. Same angle. Same structural beats.
Someone asked if I was bothered.
I wasn’t. I’m still not.
“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
That’s a quote I live by. Because here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing this: ideas aren’t the scarce resource. Execution is. And more importantly, the brain that came up with the idea is.
On two separate occasions, I’ve offered ideas to potential clients before they signed with us. They liked the ideas so much they took them and ran with them themselves. We didn’t get the work. Did it sting a little at the time? Sure. But I’m at peace with it now, because I know something they don’t yet know: they’ll struggle to come up with the next idea. And the one after that. And the one after that.
The brain is the moat
This is what AI can’t touch and copywriters using AI as a shortcut don’t understand. The words on the page are the smallest part of the work. The actual job is sitting down with someone, asking the right questions, working out what’s interesting about their business that they’ve stopped noticing, and figuring out how to say it in a way that connects with the right people.
That’s the part you can’t outsource to a machine. It’s also the part you can’t steal off LinkedIn and repackage, because you don’t have the relationship that produced it.
When someone copies our work, what they’re copying is a thin layer of output. They don’t get the conversation that surfaced the story. They don’t get the reasoning behind why we structured it that way. They don’t get the next article, or the strategic thread that runs through twelve months of newsletters. They get one article. We’ve already moved on to the next idea.
What this means if you’re hiring someone to write your content
If you’re a business owner thinking about who should be writing your articles, your newsletters, your website copy, here’s what I’d want you to take away from these two stories.
Cheap content has always existed. AI just made it cheaper, faster, and harder to spot. Your inbox, your LinkedIn feed, your competitors’ websites — all of it is filling up with content that is technically well-written and entirely empty. It says nothing your audience hasn’t already read somewhere else, because by definition, it can’t.
The content that’s going to do something for your business — the content that builds relationships, brings the right people in, and makes existing clients go “oh that’s a good point, I should send this to someone” — has to come from somewhere original. From your stories. Your clients’ stories. Your point of view. The things only you can say.
That doesn’t happen by typing a prompt into ChatGPT. It happens by sitting down with someone whose job is to dig that out of you and shape it into something readable.
Where MasterJack fits in
This is what we do. We interview you, we pull out the stories worth telling, and we write articles and newsletters that are genuinely yours — not a remix of whatever’s already on the internet about your industry. The content we produce can’t be plagiarised back to you, because nobody else has the same source material.
If you’ve been wondering whether your content is doing anything for you, or you’re staring down a new financial year wondering where your marketing budget should go, get in touch. We’d love to come up with the ideas that work specifically for the clients you want to attract — and then make sure they get out into the world.
Because in a year or two, when half the internet is AI-generated mush, the businesses that sound like humans saying real things are going to stand out a mile.
We’d like that to be you.