Fresh Corn?

Picture this. A presenter at a national design conference shows you two signs with the same exact words: FRESH CORN.

The first is a photo of a small town market on a country road. It displays a nicely designed, professionally fabricated plastic backlit sign. It’s the kind of sign a chain-store brand could hang year-round without anyone thinking twice.

The other, he pulls out from behind the podium, is a folded scrap of cardboard, the hand-painted black letters perfectly imperfect.

By a show of hands, he asks the room which sign they trust more. Every hand shot up to choose the cardboard sign.

On one level, this made no sense. The cardboard sign fails every business test we’ve been taught to trust: it’s harder to read, has no logo or brand consistency behind it. We trust this sign because we know what it costs to make. A machine-fabricated sign promising “fresh corn” doesn’t pass the test of reason if we pause to think. It promises what it can’t consistently deliver on. It’s not exactly a liar’s sign, but it can’t always be true.

Conversely, the cardboard sign suggests someone who actually had fresh corn and cared enough to make a sign that day, while the corn was still fresh. They did so with the material they had lying around in the barn or garage.

Of course, this isn’t just about corn or signs.

Our instincts run the same test on people. Nick Cave has written for years about loss in prose and lyrics that read as unmistakably authentic, and I don’t think that’s because his language is especially eloquent, though it is. It’s because we know what he’s actually lived through: the heart-aching loss of two sons. Our instincts check his words against what we know of his life experience.

A skilled ghostwriter or prompted AI tool could write a technically flawless paragraph about the same grief, and it would still read competent and hollow, like backlit plastic. It’s because competence was never what made the writing believable. What we’re checking is to what extent we can locate the cost or lived experience of words inside the prose or poetry.

That recognition, not the craft, is what makes the craft of writing believable, and therefore valuable. I’ve been thinking about the “fresh corn” signs for a while now, because, like you, I keep encountering their shadowy twin.

Multiple times a day now, I read something that is too damn perfect to have been written by an actual human.

A LinkedIn post in the exact cadence of the last four I read that morning.

Cold emails telling me how much they enjoyed reading my writing, written by something (not someone) that could just as easily be AI summarizing a Wall Street Journal article.

A “thought-leadership” piece, too perfectly crafted, lying cold on the screen sans lived experience and little verve for real life.

None of it is lying exactly. It’s just machine-made backlit plastic. It could hang there through a frozen Midwest January, and anyone who’s paying attention notices its lack of delicious freshness.

The question I’m circling here, which is perhaps at the heart of our society today, is: Who, and what, do we trust? And why?

My, how things have changed.

A decade ago, polish signaled effort — proof you’d taken a message seriously enough to get it just right.

Now, polish is the first thing that makes us raise our eyebrows with suspicion. You read something and our instincts need only spend a split-second deciding whether a person actually wrote that, or “borrowed” (OK, stole is the better word) someone else’s ideas to write it for them, or keyed their idea into some AI word generator.

Thankfully, humans have begun noticing it and consciously emphasizing the distinction. I suspect this is an act of protection and differentiation.

Journalists and writers are noting their writing wasn’t “touched by AI.”

Reports of emerging trends that reject technology in favor of handwritten “thank you” and “thinking of you” notes, snail mail, typewriter clubs, film photography, vinyl records, and slow correspondence are backlash against our digital fatigue.

Heck, even journal and fountain pen sales are on the rise.

Artists posting rough drafts and false starts beside the finished piece, so the hours show.

Each of those examples is a variation on the painted fresh corn message. It stands out because nearly everything else in our lives has become unavoidable pseudorealistic drawn-to-lifelessness corn syrup.

Ironically or not, some of my work is with people and teams inside organizations on the forefront of making machine-made ubiquitous. The answer isn’t to reject machine-made entirely, as machines have been by our side for generations. I think the answer is to become more aware of what we’re asking machines to do and what we shouldn’t outsource.

Trust building is a cost opportunity. It attaches to whatever can’t be faked at scale, and impatiently and rightly leaves behind whatever can be fabricated en masse.

I suspect this isn’t news to you, and it’s hard to hear if your job involves communicating with people at scale, as most leadership jobs do. The shortcuts people reach for under time pressure—tools that intend for us to sound present without investing the time in being present—often erode the very trust they’re meant to build. And some (or most) of what organizations signal as trustworthy needs further scrutiny: the AI-generated email, the curiosity-killing over-certainty that dominates a meeting, the too-perfect prose.

These are the near enemies of trust. Subtle enough to resemble communication, but constructed from the same cheap plastic material the untrustable “fresh corn” sign was constructed from.

If you want a more trusting team, a culture of belonging or a magnetic brand that attracts more of the right customers, I can help. If you'd like to explore if working together makes sense, drop me a line.

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