“If a Stranger Could Have Posted It, Delete It”
The Story
Charlie uses AI heavily for content creation. ChatGPT, Stanley, Gemini, NotebookLM. He’s not shy about it. But he has one ruthless filter that sits above all the tools: “If a stranger could have posted it, delete it.”
This is his quality gate. AI can generate polished, grammatically correct, well-structured content. But if that content could have been written by anyone with access to the same AI tool, it has no competitive advantage. The value isn’t in the structure or the grammar. It’s in the details only you can provide: your specific experience, your failures, your data, your contrarian take.
He later expanded this philosophy in his “AI Slop” article: “AI slop is content with no point of view.” And: “Information alone is cheap. Judgment is what costs time.”
Lesson for Creators
AI makes it easy to produce content. It makes it harder to produce distinctive content, because the floor has risen. Everyone can now write clean, competent posts. The differentiator is specificity: your stories, your numbers, your opinions. The stranger test is a one-second quality check that catches the most common failure mode of AI-assisted content.
Related
- Rick Rubin’s Lesson - Create Without the Audience in Mind — authenticity over optimization
- Don’t Watch the Competition — focus on your own voice
- Smart Threads and Dumb Memes - The Barbell Strategy — distinctive content strategy
- Only Build What Passes Three Filters — filtering for uniqueness
- People Buy From People - Rebranding to Harry’s Marketing Examples — Harry found that 50% of shares happened because people knew him, not just the content, proving personal voice drives distribution
- Your Emails Should Sound Like You’re Messaging Your Mom — write like a human, not a brand; the stranger test in email form