Signal this week from Kenzie Collins, audience psychology, brand trust.

A novel was up for France's biggest book prize.

Then somebody ran it through an AI detector and posted the result on X.

Within days the prize dropped the novel. The publisher stopped promoting it and said they had no idea whether AI had touched the book before it reached them.

Thelyson Orelien is now putting together a file to prove he wrote his own novel.

A file. To prove he wrote his own book.

Welcome to 2026, folks. A tool made a claim, nobody could check it, and the accusation did the damage on its own.

We’re all detectors now.

People decide. They don’t check.

He can't prove that he didn't. You can't prove how much you did.

And you did. I did. Most of us opened an AI agent today and asked it to tidy a paragraph.

So is that the bad thing?

Writing is my craft, so I've had to answer that one properly. The Goncourt's answer is that nothing touched by AI counts at all (fair enough). Mine is less black and white.

I think I can afford to be. Same for most of us.

Nobody's giving me a prize for the sentences I write in a social post (sigh, some of them are good). People are there for how I see things.

So I can tell you exactly what I use it for, as Head of Brand and Communications, and it costs me nothing to say so.

I'll voice note something, or just write it out badly. Half formed, sure, but I know where I want to take it, how I want it to sound.

Then I hand it over. If I haven't already named the thing myself, I find out there's a term for what I'm describing about people, communication, audiences. Sometimes a psychologist got there before I did.

I want that bigger frame around my own hunch, because it's how I learn. I spot patterns and I categorise them. Then, I share those lessons with others.

Now, AI helps me do that faster. I'm still doing the part where I describe the feeling, the experience, the being part. I don't lose that.

What I gain is the name for it, and whatever's already been worked out about it. I don't need to be the first to name the trap high achievers find themselves in. I need to be able to tie that reality to what people live and struggle with on a day-to-day.

Let’s not pretend AI gets it all the way there, all the time. If it understood on the back of very little training, it’d probably save you a lot of time in becoming just like everyone else.

You do have to train the thing. Give it enough to go off. Tweak the last 20%.

All of that is organising.

Sometimes I skip it entirely, because I trust what I've got. I’ve already done the organising in my own head. So I just write.

Either way, I've never handed over the thinking. I'm too proud of how I notice things to give that part away.

Hopefully, you’re nodding now, because you’re the same.

And yet people still say things (people) sound like AI.

So what are they actually reacting to?

Mostly, there's no person in the words anymore. No quirks, no imperfections, nothing of the particular way you build a sentence.

And underneath that, no seed of an idea that came from anyone's actual life.

A real thought, tidied up, still sounds like you. A tidy sentence with zero thought beneath it sounds like nobody… or like a robot's first day on the planet.

Tidying it harder won't fix that.

You'd never say "resilience isn't built in comfort, it's forged in the moments that test us."

And then, a line later, "growth isn't a destination, it's a journey."

To a friend. Now would you? Unless you were trying to really piss them off, lol.

That’s called a negation pattern. Loved by AI, loathed by every writer, and now, most humans, too. It’s one of the most common AI tells (we share the rest inside).

For a while my method was shouting at Claude until every last one was gone (yours too?).

Then John built a list of all of them, and a prompt that strips them. Better than shouting, as it turns out.

If you remember one thing, make it this. The writing matters. The thinking matters more.

It's the thought you had first. The observation you had before anything helped you say it, the thing a client said that you couldn't stop thinking about, the pattern you clocked three weeks before anyone else mentioned it.

Organise that as many times as you like, with whatever you like. Don't lose the part where you explain how you landed there, like a human would.

Hand the thinking over and there's nothing left to organise. No model and no label is covering that part for you.

Orelien had to build a file to prove he was the author of his own book. The rest of us just have to leave enough of ourselves in a caption, a script, a page of website copy. So nobody has to ask who wrote it.

Because little reminder: some won't ask. They'll just decide.

Hit reply and tell me which part you hand over. I've got a feeling everyone's line sits somewhere different.

Head of Brand & Communications, 1DS Collective

INSIDE AUTHORITYOS

We keep a running list of every tell that gives a draft away, and the prompt that gets them gone, for good. It won't make a thin idea good. It does stop a good one getting read as somebody else's. It's in the community.

ONE TO READ

The Globe and Mail's account of the Goncourt decision, if you want the detail. The part that stayed with me is the publisher saying plainly they had no idea. If even a publisher can’t tell… what does that say about words to come?

THIS WEEK

Open the last thing you published and find the part you thought of first.

If it's in there, and upfront, you're fine, whatever helped you write it. If you can't find it, that's your problem. Get a friend to run the same test, if you can’t do it on yourself.

Or, get a strategist.