A colleague of mine wrote a heartfelt, long-winded message in a WhatsApp group chat to his buddies. Funny, personal, just like I know the man. And the first replies in his group were: "LOL, nice prompt."

That is the authenticity tax we're all paying these days. The invisible cost of existing in a world where anything well-crafted is presumed artificial. Always second-guessing the authenticity of ANYTHING as AI invades every sector and fabric of our society.

We used to judge writing on what it said, on the clever jokes you worked in your article or your tone. Now we judge writing on whether a human bothered to type it. People have stopped trusting punctuation, em-dashes are suspicious. Writing more than three sentences in a WhatsApp message apparently makes you a robot. Using proper grammar in a casual chat? Suspicious. Should we start doubting Sjimi's periods at the end of every word or sentence he Slacks?

And the weird part is: it's actually not entirely irrational. Half of LinkedIn is auto-generated slop. Newsletters that used to have a voice now sound like everyone else's newsletter, because they're all running through the same models.

This problem, however, doesn't just affect writers: it also affects leaders.

Think about a CTO writing a strategy update for their team. Or the CEO that spent the whole weekend vibing a metric dashboard. And all they do is proudly overwhelm their peers with generated output, trying to communicate something that matters. If their words land like AI, the message dies on arrival. Not because the content is wrong, but because the reader's brain has learned to skim anything that feels polished and generated. The trust evaporates before the first paragraph is done.

You've read this article until here, and I bet the thought "did Yannick use AI to write this?" has crossed your mind at least once already.

Who should be doing the monkey work?

Then there is the perception. What happens to your thinking when you delegate the writing?

The obvious argument for AI-assisted writing is efficiency. You do the thinking, the structuring, the framing. AI does the typing. The monkey work. And that's a fair position. Not everyone is a natural writer, not everyone is fluent in English, and not everyone should have to be. If AI helps more people share their ideas publicly, that's genuinely good.

But there's a counter-argument that's harder to dismiss. Writing is not just the output of thinking. It is the thinking. Anyone who writes regularly knows this feeling: you start a post going in one direction and end up somewhere completely different. The act of putting words on a page forces you to confront whether your idea actually holds up. You hit a sentence that doesn't work and realise the logic underneath was shaky all along. That struggle, the rework, the moment where you delete half your draft because it's not honest enough, that's where the insight lives.

Skip the writing and you risk skipping the thinking. Not always, not in every context. But more often than people admit.

This is dangerous for leaders. If you're a CTO and every strategy doc or team update flows through an AI before it reaches anyone else, the question isn't whether people can tell. The question is whether you still know what you actually think. Whether you still have opinions that are yours, shaped by the friction of articulating them, rather than smoothed into plausibility by a model that's very good at sounding reasonable. It's about your credibility.

When to struggle through

There are things that are worth automating and things that are worth struggling through. Technical documentation, lab notes, capturing what happened during a long troubleshooting session: that is exactly what AI should be writing. It remembers the details you forget and structures the mess.

But the opinion piece? The strategy that defines your next year? The post that's supposed to show the market who you are and what you stand for? That's not monkey work, it is the work. If you delegate it, you're probably not saving time but simply outsourcing your point of view and personality.

Imagine a basketball coach doing the half-time talk reading off a perfectly generated script. You can outsource the words, sure. But the moment your squad senses you're reading from someone else's script, they stop running for you.

The message is yours

Here's the thing about the authenticity tax: it's going to keep rising.

As AI-generated content gets better, the bar for "distinctively human" gets higher. I've said it before. "Made by Humans" will become a quality label, one you need to earn. The only content that will cut through is content that could only have come from you. Your specific experience, your named opinions, your willingness to say something an AI wouldn't risk saying. The carrier, the output, the way to present it to your audience can be whatever AI generates, but the message should be yours. Readers will soon choose for themselves what format they consume your content in.

And of course, you can use tooling to help you write and produce. You simply need to be aware that overusing it will hollow you out. But when it comes to the ideas that define you, or the positions that make people want to work with you, do it yourself.

The monkey work might be the whole point.