A true fact almost made me a liar.
My drafting agent wrote a cold email using a real quote from a podcast. The founder said his company would hit 4 million sends that month. Verified, sourced, accurate.
I nearly hit send in July. The podcast aired in March.
Nothing in that draft was false. The quote was real, the number was real, the source was real. But "this month" meant March, and my copy said it like it meant now. A four-month-old fact wearing fresh tense.
I caught it by hand, one read before sending. Then I made it impossible to happen again.
Every signal now carries the date it was observed. If the signal is under 45 days old, present tense is allowed. Between 46 and 180 days, past tense only, and words like "just" and "recently" are blocked. Past 180 days, it cannot anchor a message at all.
Most personalization tooling checks whether a fact is real. That is not enough. A fact has three ways to lie: it can be false, it can be irrelevant, or it can be stale and dressed up as current. The third one is the hardest to catch because every individual word is true.
Old facts are allowed to be old. They are not allowed to sound new.
If your AI writes your outreach, ask it what date it thinks the signal happened. If it cannot tell you, it does not know it is lying.