"Proof of humanity" is the biggest marketing opportunity right now 🫆

How to make AI fatigue your unfair advantage

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How can your brand help people avoid AI?

Weird question coming from me, I know (I love Claude).

But every website you open now has this widget:

Port’s website has the same Slack widget…

But it says it’s a human:

Smart! 🧠

That’s the biggest trend in tech right now: everybody wants a human.

Even if your bot is smarter and faster than a person, people don’t want to be the guinea pigs who test it. A human is more reliable right now, and a human has all the privileges, like issuing a refund or opening the admin panel.

Your competitors replaced people with bots wherever they could, so a human who answers is rare now. That’s AI fatigue working for you.

So here are 3 ways to put humans back into your marketing ↓

1. Put a real person where people expect a bot 👋

Port’s widget is a Slack connector: your message goes into their Slack.

Legit Security does the same with a “Chat over Slack” button, right next to “Book Demo”:

Gartner asked thousands of customers about AI in customer service, and 53% said they’d consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was going to use it.

Do this:

• 💻 Change your chat’s opening message to “Real person here! I’m [Name], write to me and I’ll answer”, and replace the robot icon with your photo. Then answer it yourself.

• 🌌 Add an offline message so the promise holds while you sleep: “It’s [Name], I’m offline. Leave your email and a person replies within one business day”. If you don’t have a widget at all → put your name and face next to the support email instead.

2. Say what you DON’T use AI for ⛔️

Aerie pledged to never use AI-generated people in its ads:

Aerie’s pledge

It became the brand’s most-liked Instagram post with 40,000+ likes, and that quarter’s sales grew 23%. (Correlation, I know. I’d still take it.)

Among people under 30, 66% react negatively to businesses using AI in ads. Yup, the AI-friendly generation is allergic to AI ads!

Do this:

• ✏️ Write a post like Aerie’s - along the lines of “we will never use AI for [the thing your customers care most about]”.

• 👱🏻‍♀️ Sign the product: “Made by [Name] and [Name]”, with photos, in the footer or on the About page.

• 🌈 Put a sentence on your pricing page (or your support page): “Every support reply here is written by a person, at 2 AM too”.

3. Host something with no screens 🪑

At a recent conference, we built a branded “No-AI Zone” near the entrance, with free coffee, board games, a postcard-writing station, and a working mailbox. Most booths inside were selling AI.

Wiz’s no-AI zone

I've been collecting examples since I wrote about proof it’s human last November, and my favorite is Ramp: they put Kevin from The Office in a glass office in Manhattan, doing expense reports by hand for 7 hours, and the clips passed 85M views.

Ramp’s stunt

Ramp’s own explanation to this stunt: “We wanted to show something real in an AI world”. *chef’s kiss*

A few more from the past year:

• Cursor rents a café for a day and puts its engineers in name tags so users can come meet them. The NYC slots had a waitlist.

• Thursday, the dating app, shut down its own app and became an in-person events company, now in about 150 cities.

• Pinterest ran a phone-free space at Coachella: phones locked in pouches at the door, and a printed guide instead of QR codes.

• Hinge has given $2.3M to running clubs and book clubs (yes, a dating app paying people to get off the app).

Anthropic’s version was the “thinking” hat, and I waited 2 hours in line for mine.

café cursor

Do this:

• ⚙️ The cheapest version is office hours in a café, in a city where your customers already are (or the day before a conference you’re attending anyway). Post from your own account: “I’m at [café] on [day], 9 to 11. Come by and I’ll fix your homepage in person, coffee’s on me”. About $40 in coffee, and Cursor had a waitlist for theirs.

• 🍔 Host a dinner for 8-10 customers, phones in a basket at the door.

• 🎪 If you have a booth this year → set up a folding table where someone does the task your product automates, by hand, in front of everyone, under a sign that says “This is what [product] replaces”.

Have an amazing week ✌️

Tom

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P.S. For your own writing, the Anti-AI cheat sheet covers the 15 patterns readers catch.

P.P.S. There’s even a marketplace where AI agents “rent” humans: rentahuman.ai lists 795K+ people available for hire for real-world tasks. Even the AIs are buying human! 😅