Is This AI?

Ryan Vet

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“AI slop,” the comment read, complete with the rolling-on-the-floor laughing emoji. It was the second nearly identical comment I had received. Ironically, it was posted by what appeared to be a bot account. The comment on a YouTube video of a podcast interview and excerpt had nothing to do with artificial intelligence, nor did it have anything remotely AI-ish in the conversation or visuals.

The illusion of potential AI usage is sowing seeds of distrust in devastating ways. Before these bot comments, I received a real text from a real colleague. I had sent a video out to all of my partners and sponsors prior to a major event I hosted a few weeks ago. The text came in, “Is the video you include in these partner emails AI? Lol.”

In fact, it was not AI at all. It had not been touched by AI, not edited by AI, not scripted by AI. The date stamp on the video is actually several years old, long before video AI could have produced that level of video quality. The video was me, speaking off-the-cuff, then edited together to cut back on some of my rambling…

But both of these accusations revealed a larger pattern. I started thinking. People initially question and distrust the content they receive, even if they know the sender or the content is genuinely authentic.

We are all questioning things everyday: Is the phone person answering the phone real, or are they AI? Is the video that my business partner sends me AI? Is this newsletter that you’re reading right now AI (it’s not ;)?

A deepfake on Father’s Day

On Sunday, this all came to a head. On Father’s Day, we decided to spend the afternoon at home together as a family. My family was sitting on the couch watching the UNC versus Oklahoma NCAA Men’s College World Series. I stepped away to the kitchen to refill my water and get a snack.

All of a sudden, I heard the breaking-news chime with an announcer saying the broadcast was being interrupted for an urgent message from the President of the United States. Then the voice of Donald Trump. I came running back to our family room to hear the President urgently say something so significant had happened to shape the history of America, the he needed to interrupt all broadcasts.

At first, my eyes were glued to the screen, wondering if the US had just nuked somebody, a major politician had died, or what news was so important that it would interrupt the stream. President Trump continued his message with very similar speech patterns and rhetoric that Trump would use, making it almost believable. Then, I noticed a strange QR code in the bottom right corner, and a URL, and the President started asking us to transfer money to his crypto wallets. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me 3-5 seconds to realize I was watching a deepfake.

We were part of the latest stream-jacking campaign by hackers trying to get people to give them money, me and the almost 30,000 other people watching the Live UNC-Oklahoma stream on that YouTube channel.

What’s most embarrassing, I’ll admit, is the fact that when I present my AI course, From Human Hesitation to AI Acceleration, I use a similar tactic, leveraging deepfakes as an illustration to warn against them. And yet here I was for a split second, mesmerized. Then, the curious side of me didn’t switch off the fake stream–I continued to watch for another 30 seconds or so, analyzing the quality of this AI deepfake and trying to understand the ruse.

What was concerning to me is how incredibly convincing the video was. And it is not happening in a vacuum.

Our country has moved to a place of historically low trust. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, nearly 7 out of 10 people now worry that institutional leaders are deliberately misleading the public (Edelman, 2026). Trust has declined the most in national government leaders and major news organizations, while it has become more concentrated among people closer to us: our coworkers, our neighbors, and our families.

In other words, the circle of trust is getting smaller.

And if you look at Gen Z and Millennials in particular, the distrust appears even more pronounced. That matters because these are the generations coming of age, building companies, leading teams, consuming media, and deciding what they believe is real.

We have learned to doubt reality before

It takes me back to the early days of social media, where we over-filtered our images. We posted only the best photos. We were selective in showing people the best parts of our lives. More recently, social media has moved towards volume and more authentic content rather than the carefully curated feeds that dotted Millennials’ early social media years.

We used to question Millennials’ feeds for accuracy and authenticity. Now, we are taking that same skepticism and directing it at nearly every piece of content or interaction. And it is dangerous.

Everywhere we turn: Was the person that just answered that call real or AI? Is that the President of the United States or a deepfake? Is that video of the kid wrestling the crocodile and winning real or AI?

For many years in my life, I took April Fool’s jokes seriously—too seriously, as if it was one of the most important days of the year. I remember back in the early days of Facebook, I Photoshopped myself with a shaved head and put it as my profile picture. The comment section went wild. That level of photo manipulation did not widely exist on the internet at that point in time. There was little attention paid to the date of the calendar or questioning the photo’s veracity.

Within a few short years, I was no longer the only kid in school with access to Photoshop on my personal computer. YouTube videos taught others how to manipulate photos for fun. That same prank two years later would have been riddled with people asking, “Is that Photoshopped?”

We saw the same with Instagram. “What filter did you use?” which compelled people to begin using the hashtag on Instagram, #nofilter, because the photo was just so naturally beautiful, and people challenged it and did not believe it. It is almost as if we did not believe beauty could be real.

And to be fair, sometimes the suspicion was earned. One study of more than 18,000 “no filter” posts found that about 12% had actually used a filter (Santarossa, et al., 2017).

So this is not completely new. Photoshop made us question photos. Filters made us question beauty. Now AI is making us question almost everything.

The credibility hedge

In writing this, I came across a couple of ideas from psychology that helped me put words to what I think is happening.

The first is called epistemic vigilance. The basic idea is that because we depend on what other people tell us, we are constantly calibrating how much we should trust the information coming at us (Sperber, et al, 2010). We are always asking, even if subconsciously: Is this person credible? Is this information reliable? Is this true?

The second idea is source derogation. Instead of engaging with what was actually said, we dismiss where it came from. We attack the source. We wave it off. And that is the lower-effort move.

You do not have to wrestle with the substance if you can dismiss the source. Put those together, and you get what I call a credibility hedge.

Calling something “AI slop” is not always a real judgment about the content. Sometimes it is a way to protect yourself. If it turns out to be AI, you called it. If it turns out not to be AI, you can always say, “Well, it just felt off.” “No filter” was a badge people wore to prove the photo was real. “AI slop” is becoming the inverse badge. It is a badge people wear to prove their skepticism is real.

And that is what concerns me. Because at some point, skepticism stops being wisdom and starts becoming a cop-out.

Is what you are creating human?

Because I have been involved around AI and automation for more than a decade, I often have people reach out wanting my take on how to build something with AI. Two friends, in particular, were especially focused on riding the AI wave to the next dot-com-boom.

And to be clear, I get it. There is real opportunity here. But in their pursuit to each build out their new “billion dollar company” with AI, there was a fatal flaw. They were trying to build an enterprise using cranked-out content to make them rich. In doing so, they forgot the human part of business. One of my favorite mantras in all of business comes from The Ritz-Carlton: “We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” The idea of one human serving another is not going away anytime soon. As humans, we long for that connection and community. And quite frankly, that human connection is the core of any business, regardless of what you sell.

While plenty of people are making money off AI content, faceless videos, e-books, social media, and all of that, there is still one thing that wins, and it has always won: is what you are creating human?

That is why the two “AI slop” comments made me pause and rewatch the videos. Was my voice not clear enough? Were my opinions not original enough? Was there something about the tone that felt manufactured? Or was it just truly a bot trolling the internet? I think it was probably the latter. But when one of my actual sponsors looked at a real video that goes to all of my sponsoring partners and wondered if it was AI, even though it was not an AI video at all, that made me ask a harder question. What does that say about me? What does it say about my voice? What does it say about the moment we are in? Maybe nothing. Or maybe it says everything.

Knowing where you are going

You see, as leaders, we are in an interesting time where trust is eroding, and we must figure out how to rebuild trust.

It could actually be simpler than we think. At the end of the day, we need an authentic voice. We have to have our own convictions. And we have to know where we are going.

I was sitting with a large organization and some of their senior leaders in a meeting the other day. They had come to the realization that most people in their organization could not definitively say where the company was going. Nearly every employee and even stakeholder could recite their mission statement, as it was plastered all over this organization’s walls and materials.  Those in the organization knew what they did every day, but they were so much in the daily grind that they did not know where they were going. That direction had drifted somewhere in the last several years.

I think that is true beyond the walls of this one group. I think we have sped up our work, produced more content, created things more quickly, offloaded so much to technology and automation, and have made things more efficient, that somewhere in all of it, we have lost track of vision and where we are going and what is most important in life.

And as a leader, I think that is where we need to lead.

Could everyone say where your organization is going? Could they definitively say where you are leading them? Could they articulate the value that you add for your clients or stakeholders and detail the difference that you make?

Because that is what cannot be replaced with AI: clear direction, clear vision, and clear leadership from one human being to another.