Why I’m building a personal brand in the age of AI

The obvious argument against building a personal brand right now is that the internet is about to be flooded. If a model can produce a competent essay, a decent logo and a serviceable website in the time it takes to write a brief, then the marginal value of producing competent things drops towards zero. Why add to the pile?

I think that argument is right about the pile and wrong about the conclusion.

What gets commoditised is output. What does not get commoditised is the accumulated record of a specific person making specific decisions over time. A model can generate a thousand branding frameworks. It cannot generate the fact that I chose this route and rejected that one, on this project, for reasons I was willing to write down and be wrong about in public.

That is the asset. Not expertise in the abstract — expertise is increasingly available on tap — but a visible history of judgement.

Taste is a track record, not a claim

Everybody in this industry says they have good taste. Almost nobody demonstrates it in a way that can be checked. A portfolio shows the outcomes you are proud of, which is precisely the set of work least likely to reveal how you think. The interesting material is everywhere else: the idea you killed, the version that was better but did not survive the constraint, the thing you got wrong and fixed eighteen months later.

A personal site is one of the few formats where you can keep that material. Not a feed, which is optimised for the last forty-eight hours. Not a portfolio, which is optimised for hiring. Something that accumulates.

The defensible thing is being specific

Generic content was always weak. It is now worse than weak, because it is indistinguishable from machine output and will be treated as such. “Five principles of good branding” is dead on arrival.

But “here is a packaging detail I cannot stop thinking about, and here is why it works” is not replaceable, because it is anchored to a particular person noticing a particular thing. Specificity is the moat. Not volume, not polish, not SEO.

This has a practical consequence I am still adjusting to: the useful stuff to publish is often the stuff that feels too small to publish. The observation, the reference, the half-formed business idea, the reason a decision went the way it did.

Building in public as a forcing function

There is a second reason, which is less strategic and more selfish. Writing things down makes me think more carefully. Publishing them makes me think more carefully still, because being wrong in public is expensive enough to be motivating.

Most of what I do professionally happens inside other people’s brands, under other people’s constraints, and disappears into their systems. Having somewhere that is mine — where the constraint is only whether the thinking holds up — changes the quality of attention I bring to it.

So what is this, then

Not a portfolio of what I have done. A record of what I am building, thinking about and becoming. Those are different documents with different obligations. The first one has to look finished. The second one only has to be honest, which is harder and more useful.

I would rather start that record now, badly, than wait until I have the perfect version of it. The compounding starts when you begin, not when you are ready.