Taste, guts and receipts

Log out of ChatGPT. Not forever. Just for the length of this column. You can log back in at the end. I’ll tell you what to do differently. 

One of the most-followed executives in mortgage just paid a top LinkedIn voice a few thousand dollars to spend eight weeks teaching him how to have AI produce all of his content. 

He couldn’t wait to tell me.

The great averaging of mortgage content

The biggest names in this industry were rarely self-written to begin with. Ghostwriters, coaches, monthly services where a professional writer sits with an executive, pulls the real thinking out of them and shapes it into posts. They built half of the recognizable brands in the mortgage industry, and some of them still run that way. 

The rest have quietly swapped the writer for a bot. Tela Mathias runs PhoenixTeam, which built and operates the Mortgage Bankers Association’s AI Mortgage Change Champion program. I asked what’s going wrong. “We call that phenomenon the great averaging. All of the foundation model providers are trained on essentially the same body of knowledge. They will produce, all things being equal, basically the same result.” A lender could build the same website with six different models, she told me, and “the result will look the same.” 

Every executive who hands their brand to AI is being averaged against every other one who did the same. I’ve written before about mortgage marketing producing assets instead of outcomes. AI didn’t change that.

The old ghostwriters were paid to extract your real thinking. The bot skips the interview. What it hands back is averaged from everyone else who asked it the same question. 

Build a backbone instead. It has three parts: taste, guts and receipts. 

Part 1: Taste

Taste is knowing what sounds like you, and having the discipline to throw out everything that doesn’t, including the stuff that’s genuinely well-written. AI will hand you fifty clean drafts in a minute. Every single one will be fine. You have read a thousand fine LinkedIn posts this year, and you could not repeat a single one back to me right now. 

I read a lot of content that isn’t mine. Client social, competitor posts, whatever crosses my feed in a given week. And I can tell, almost every time, when AI writes something. Even from people who think they scrubbed it clean. The rhythm goes even. The word choices flatten out. Scroll your feed for ten seconds, you’ll find one. 

Here’s one anyway: “Rates just dropped by 25 bps. Here’s what that really means for your buyers. In this market, speed wins. This isn’t just a rate change. It’s an opportunity. Who’s ready?” You’ve posted some version of that yourself this year. 

Fine is forgettable. Hold every draft to a harder test: Tomorrow morning, without looking back at it, try to quote one line from the draft you wrote today. If you can’t, kill it before you write the next one. 

Part 2: Guts

Guts is harder because the industry spent a decade training it out of us. We watched what happened to the loud voices in 2008 and learned the lesson too well: round yourself down, say the safe thing. I’ve sat in marketing meetings where the entire strategy, unspoken but understood by everyone in the room, was don’t upset anyone. It worked. Nobody was upset. Nobody remembered us either. 

Careful is costing you money right now. The recruit you want is reading your LinkedIn the night before her call with you, and it sounds like the four other companies are also recruiting her this month. The Realtor partner you need scrolled past nine identical rate posts this morning and could not tell you who posted a single one of them. 

Now she’s asking ChatGPT about you. Your brand used to be what people said when you left the room. Now it’s also what the model says when someone asks it, and if everything you’ve ever published is average, the model has nothing distinct to tell her. You’re invisible at the exact moment she’s doing diligence on you. 

Most people think they already have guts. They write “it’s about relationships, not rates” or “people do business with people” and feel brave for a second. Nobody disagrees with those, which is exactly the tell. A real position has a face attached to the disagreement. If you can’t name the specific person who’d push back on your sentence, you wrote a value statement. 

Guts is having one sentence you would defend in a room full of people who disagree with it. Mine. I’ve said it in print under my own name: Mortgage marketing is still operating like it’s 2008, frozen by a fear nearly two decades old. AI cannot write you that sentence. It has nothing on the line; you do. 

And receipts. The one you can’t fake. 

Part 3: Receipts

In a feed full of synthetic content, specificity is how anyone knows you’re a real person: a date, a dollar amount, the deal that blew up at 4 p.m. Publish average content long enough, and you launder yourself out of your own record, and even a great ghostwriter, human or machine, has nothing left to extract from you. 

A receipt is a decision and a cost. Missing either, it’s just an opinion. Mine is a policy I’ve never broken: I say no to clients more than I say yes. A draft comes in clean, technically on brand. I still send it back. You can’t publish this; it took one brain cell to write. The cost is real: A faster yes would make the retainer easier and the client happier in the moment. I hold the line anyway. Their name is the one on it. 

That’s the test for a receipt: Here’s what I actually held the line on, and what it cost me to hold it. If you can’t point to something you said or did before the room agreed with you, what you’re running is a posting schedule.

Finding the sentence the model couldn’t write

So back to ChatGPT. Log in again. Ask it to write the post every executive in mortgage will publish about today’s news. It will, instantly. That’s your banned list. Now write the sentence it couldn’t. Point the great averaging at itself, then write around it. 

Everything else was already average. 

The feeds are full of posts that could be about any market in any year, written by anyone with a login. Yours shouldn’t be. 

As for the executive who paid a few thousand dollars to skip the only step that was ever worth paying for, I hope he gets his money back. 

How to spot AI writing: 

• The “not this, but that” line. Sounds smart. Says nothing.
• Matched pairs. “Fostering X and driving Y.” Too tidy to be a real thought.
• Lists of three. Especially three “-ing” words in a row.
• Vague people. “Industry leaders,” “key stakeholders.” Real writing names someone.
• Fake hedging. “It’s not uncommon for…” Just say it.
• Everything wraps up too neatly. Real answers leave something messy.
• Announcing before saying. “Let’s dive in,” “here’s the thing.” Just say the thing.
• Words that are trying too hard. “Game-changing.” “Essential.” Overly ordinary stuff.
• A closer that just repeats the opener, with different words

Bri Lees is a fractional CMO and mortgage marketing thought leader.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of HousingWire’s editorial department and its owners. To contact the editor responsible for this piece: zeb@hwmedia.com.