INSIGHTS & PERSPECTIVES
Why AI-generated marketing is becoming easier to ignore
-
Tom Dempster
- Published on
Another day, and another social media feed littered with AI flyers. You cannot scroll through local Facebook groups without seeing an upcoming event promoted using one of those identikit ChatGPT outputs. You know the ones; no blank space anywhere, completely overloaded with information, a wide variety of icons listing a myriad of benefits, and yes, that font. The telltale signs are always there and easily identifiable.
It’s the same with social media posts and website articles generated using large language models (LLMs). You can spot them a mile away. Paragraphs and structure are tossed aside in favor of the exact same cadence and sentence construction almost every time. “But here’s the really interesting part…”, and so on. Thank goodness the em-dash era was short-lived.
‘Unfiltered AI’ – that is, AI with no human input or adjustments – is easy to use. This is a blessing and a curse for businesses relying solely on AI models for their marketing materials and written copy. The blessing is that you can have an output in a matter of minutes. The curse? So can everyone else.
So, really, I assure you, without touching anything approximating an AI model, here is the genuinely really interesting part: if you are using unfiltered AI in your marketing, then you are running the risk of being left behind by competitors your potential customers deem are more authentic and trustworthy than you are. Let’s look at the reasons why.
The major reasons to avoid using unfiltered AI
As I see it, there are four compelling reasons to avoid using unfiltered AI in your marketing content.
I’ll caveat this by saying that I am looking at this purely from a marketing and business perspective. There are well-documented ethical concerns around issues such as bias, privacy, transparency and human oversight, alongside environmental concerns related to the energy, water and carbon footprint of AI infrastructure. I will not address these points below, but they are worthy considerations nonetheless.
AI fatigue
Due to the aforementioned similarity in visual and written outputs from AI models, there is little variation from one piece of marketing content to another when using unfiltered AI. Research into attentional habituation suggests that repeated exposure to familiar visual patterns can cause people to pay progressively less attention to them. This is a huge problem because one of the main aims of marketing is to disrupt and attract attention. If users are simply adjusting to scroll past your social media post, engagement will inevitably suffer as a result.
Consumer trust
In the age of AI – when we have to question everything we see and read online – building trust is more important than ever for businesses. One way to rapidly erode that trust is to use AI to produce marketing output that isn’t true to your brand or doesn’t resonate with your customers, or even worse, is just a complete misrepresentation of what you actually offer.
When the marketing material is clearly AI-sourced and not representative of the product or service the business sells, it creates doubt for consumers, not to mention that it can often create a disconnect between expectation vs. reality (restaurants have done this for years in advertising, so in some ways it is nothing new, but I do find that restaurant AI flyers are some of the biggest culprits of the expectation vs. reality trap. They are often called out for it on social media, too).
Get practical perspectives on SEO, AI and the digital marketing decisions businesses are wrestling with, delivered to your inbox.
What it might imply about your business
Reduced engagement, visibility and trust may be direct results of using unfiltered AI, but I think there are also indirect consequences that should be considered – such as how people’s perceptions of your business may shift as a result (covered also in ‘AI backlash’ below). I’ve seen this a lot in creative industries like photographers using generative AI for flyers, or realtors using them for their property descriptions. If you’re a solopreneur and your success depends on building relationships, will your clients choose someone who relies on AI to do all of their marketing work? Does it imply you’ll cut corners elsewhere in your work? I’m not saying it does, but it plants a seed that would otherwise not exist.
AI backlash
This is perhaps a more minor reason, but still relevant. You may have noticed in some online groups that there is a sub-set of the community that will comment “AI slop” and similar comments underneath any AI-generated flyer. This dilutes and distracts from the message of any marketing output.
More broadly, public enthusiasm for AI appears to be weakening in both Britain and the United States. 62% of Britons in an Ipsos survey said AI products and services made them nervous, while 52% of Americans said they were more concerned than excited about its growing use. The Ipsos survey also asked about trust of brands using AI for various marketing and advertising tasks. Just 34% said they would trust a brand more if they used AI to enhance product descriptions, with similar numbers for writing product descriptions (33%), creating images/video (30%), and writing product reviews (29%).
Final thoughts
In this conversation, there’s a big distinction between unfiltered AI and responsible use of AI.
I think responsibly using AI – not necessarily for marketing output or ideation, but for automating routine or mundane tasks or helping with data analysis – definitely has a place. For example, I recently used AI to search for messaging inaccuracies across a number of different websites owned by the same group. This produced a list of action items that were easily addressed, and ensured consistent messaging across the portfolio – a manual check would have taken far longer. I’ve also seen how some SEOs have used it alongside Google Analytics to get insights into performance. For me, its use is really on a case-by-case basis, but as a general rule, I think utilizing AI for internal, data-oriented tasks is more valuable than anything customer-facing.
I also understand that this is a difficult tightrope for businesses and marketing teams to walk. If you don’t utilize the tools available, then there is a fear of missing out and being left behind. However, I think the actual danger is using the tools in a way that reduces trust and results in your business being indistinguishable from its competitors.
What I always encourage businesses to do is to look at how they can use the tools to their advantage, while staying true to their own messaging and brand values. The best test is to place yourself in the mind of your ideal client – will your marketing content help achieve your desired goal? Will your audience engage with it? Is it going to help or hinder your overall marketing efforts?
If you’re using unfiltered AI, it’s almost certain that you will increasingly find it an uphill battle to achieve long-term marketing success. The old saying is “work smarter, not harder”, but it isn’t smart to erode consumer trust and lose your brand’s authenticity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
