There's a Louis CK bit where God comes back to Earth after being away for a while. He looks around at what humanity has done and asks, "What have you done here?"

I've been thinking about this bit a lot lately, because I see something similar happening with brands. Not God returning, but something just as clarifying: AI becoming a kind of truth layer that nobody asked for and nobody can control.

And I think it's a good thing.

Here's what I mean. In my work, I've seen countless companies with a gap between what they say they are and what they actually are. A "customer-first" company with support tickets that go unanswered for weeks. An "innovative" brand that hasn't shipped anything meaningful in years. These gaps have always existed. What's changing is how visible they're becoming.

The Era of Hacks

For a long time, brands could control their narratives through short-term fixes. I watched this playbook evolve over the years: game the search algorithm, dominate social feeds with volume, buy enough ads to own the first page of results. If something negative appeared, there were ways to bury it, outspend it, or wait for it to fade.

These hacks worked because channels were siloed. Most people would never cross-reference what a company said on LinkedIn with what former employees said on Glassdoor with what customers said on Reddit. You could present different faces in different places. The narrative was, to a meaningful degree, hackable.

But hacks are, by definition, shortcuts around the real work. They let brands avoid the harder question of whether they were actually delivering on their promises.

Why the Hacks Don't Work Anymore

AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are changing this dynamic. They're not just new search engines. They're synthesis machines.

When someone asks an AI about a company or product, the AI doesn't show a list of links you can manipulate. It pulls information from everywhere: marketing sites, news articles, review platforms, forums, social media. Then it synthesises all of that into a single answer. The carefully siloed channels suddenly get collapsed into one response.

This is where the old hacks fall apart. Single-channel manipulation becomes ineffective when AI aggregates across all channels simultaneously. You can't SEO your way out of a Reddit thread. You can't outspend a pattern of Glassdoor reviews. The shortcuts stop working.

In some cases, aggressive advertising that contradicts widespread sentiment could even highlight the disconnect rather than paper over it.

Why This Is a Good Thing

Here's where I differ from the doom-and-gloom takes on this shift: I think it's genuinely positive. Yes, it's a little sad that it took machines to hold us accountable for being honest. But if that's what it takes, I'll take it.

The practical implication is straightforward: when hacks stop working, you have to do the real work. When narrative control becomes harder, alignment between claims and reality becomes the only viable strategy.

If a company says it's customer-first, the customer experience needs to actually reflect that. If a brand positions itself as ethical, the practices need to hold up to scrutiny from multiple sources. Clear, consistent, honest messaging matters more when that messaging can be instantly fact-checked against the entire internet.

I think of it like this: imagine telling everyone your polar bear is white and wanting everyone to believe your polar bear is white, when it really isn't, and it worked, for decades, but now AI has access to all the photos showing it's actually brown. The gap becomes obvious.

This is a filter that rewards companies doing the right thing. If you've been genuinely delivering on your promises, you have nothing to worry about. If you've been relying on the gap between perception and reality, that gap is closing. And that's good for customers, good for markets, and ultimately good for the businesses willing to compete on substance rather than spin.

The Question Worth Asking

Back to the Louis CK bit. It works because the idea of God returning to judge us is absurd and hypothetical.

For brands, though, this kind of judgment is becoming less hypothetical. AI systems are already synthesising information, already answering questions about companies, already presenting something closer to an aggregate truth than any single marketing channel ever could.

The good news? This isn't something to fear if you've been doing the work. It's worth asking: if an AI synthesised everything the internet knows about your business and presented it to a potential customer, what would that answer look like?

If you like the answer, you're ahead of the game. If you don't, the path forward is clear: stop looking for hacks and start doing the real work.

The truth layer is here. It's not going anywhere. And that's a good thing.