Free Report – AI in Marketing: The Good, Bad, and Ugly Truth Warning

I have a confession to make. I have been using AI in marketing for a few weeks now.

I am a terrible writer suffering from constant writer’s block and lacking the ability to coherently write my thoughts. So I use all the tools I can such as Hemingway Editor, Grammarly, and now an artificial intelligence application.

AI helps. But it could be better, as I point out in my article below. You should know the good, the bad, and the ugly truth about using AI in marketing your products and services.

There is no shame in wanting to find good tools, shortcuts and helpful products that can benefit your business as an online entrepreneur. In fact, avoiding all new technology just because it takes you out of your comfort zone can be foolish.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for years, in many aspects of our lives. But recently, it has blasted onto the Internet marketing scenes like a bull in a China shop. Without complete understanding or careful thought, tools based on AI and courses being taught about using them are not taking into consideration potential problems.

You have to know that as soon as something like this emerges, dozens of unethical marketers are going to jump on the chance to sell you a “push button” solution they claim will deliver overnight riches.

In fact, many are claiming you can write a bestselling novel in less than 10 minutes using AI, or that you’ll never have to write a single word again for your online content. Out of sheer desperation and desire, thousands will adopt these misleading claims as truth, setting their business up for a big fall in the near future.

But let’s not make this an AI bashing session, either.

Like most tools, it has good uses and can benefit many individuals. If you want to uncover the proper way to embrace this technology, read on – but using it without knowledge or avoiding it completely can also be a form of self-sabotage.

Artificial Intelligence Can Be Beneficial to Many Online Entrepreneurs

Let’s start with the positive aspects of how AI can help online entrepreneurs because there is value in this tool. When you think about how marketers struggle with different strengths and weaknesses, you can probably imagine how AI can step up to help improve in areas lacking.

Brainstorming ideas and outlines is one great use of AI tools. When you feel uninspired or want to get more than what you could come up with, you can ask AI to give you an outline based on a topic.

Drilling down further into topics is another excellent use. For example, you might start with an issue about dog care, asking for some dog care topics. Then if you find one you like, ask it to drill down with more ideas.

For example, if you say, “Give me some dog care topics,” it will give you things like:

• Dog nutrition
• Dog training
• Dog Health
• Dog Grooming and so on

Get it to drill down by asking, “Give me ten dog training topics to write about.” It will give you things like:

• Potty training
• Obedience training
• Clicker training
• Leash training
• Socialization and more.

Another thing AI can do for you is expand on topics into other niche areas. For example, let’s say your issue was weight loss, and you asked AI to give you some different niches related to the weight loss niche.

It might tell you:

• Beauty
• Fashion
• Cooking
• Stress, and so on.

You can even have it tell you how it’s tied into the main niche topic. For example, it will tell you that the cooking niche is tied in because “learning to cook healthy meals at home can be an important part of a weight loss plan.”

For fashion, it says, “Fashion niches such as clothing and accessories can help people feel more confident in their appearance, which can be an important part of feeling good about oneself while trying to lose weight.”

Helping you get your point across more concisely is another thing AI can do for you. For example, if you’re wrong about using bloated content that tends to bore people or need to be more concise in your social media post, ask AI to trim down your content to 3-4 sentences.

AI can summarize a blog post and then link back to the full version when you post it on Facebook or elsewhere. You can even ask it to hype up the content or include a call to action if you want to.

AI can help you write all elements of your sales copy. It can give you headline ideas (that you can mix and match). It can turn thoughts into bullet points and help you create a storyline or a call to action with a sense of urgency.

You can use AI tools to figure out how to introduce a topic. If you type in, “What would be a good introduction for an article about learning how to use solar products and the best products to buy for a beginner survival prepper?”

It will give you a rather sterile answer. Still, you can at least see what concepts it includes so that you can write something from scratch that better captures your voice and advice without missing any critical elements.

Helping you with a wrap-up statement or conclusion works the same. Again, if you feed it your article, it can help you summarize the content, and again – you can ask it to include a call to action before writing it in your own words.

Giving you affiliate marketing ideas and slants is another beautiful use of AI. For example, you might ask, “What are 20 types of products a survival prepper niche marketer could promote as an affiliate?”

It would tell you things like:

• Survival Food Kits
• Water Filters
• Solar-Powered Generators
• First Aid Kits, and so on.

But then, you can take your previous question and insert just one of the items from the list above, like this: “What are 20 types of survival food products a survival prepper would need?”

It would then drill down and tell you things like:

• MREs (meals ready to eat)
• Freeze-dried food
• Canned foods
• Grains
• Jerky
• Protein bar, and more.

If you’re struggling with ideas on what to say about a product you want to promote, ask AI to give you some ideas. For example, you can say, “What should people look for when buying MREs as survival food to store?”

The system will say things like:

• Shelf life
• Nutritional value
• Variety
• Caloric intake
• Durable packaging, and more.

AI can also be a good keyword generator. If you tell it, “Give me a keyword cluster for an article about solar survival gear,” it will deliver the following:

• Solar power
• Survival gear
• Emergency Preparedness
• Off-grid living
• Renewable energy
• Portable solar panels
• Solar-powered generators
• Solar-powered lights
• Solar-powered water filtration
• Solar-powered communications devices
• Solar-powered cooking devices
• Alternative power sources
• Sustainable living
• Outdoor adventures
• Camping gear
• Hiking gear
• Eco-friendly products
• Energy independence
• Power outages
• Natural disasters

Now as you can see, some of those are not closely related to solar survival. So I’d eliminate outdoor adventures, camping gear, eco-friendly products, hiking gear, and maybe others unrelated to solar survival.

So as you can see, the tools have a great many uses. What’s sad is that many people will abuse it and leverage it to sabotage their business rather than helps them accelerate their success.

People can also use AI content for graphic design, videos, and music. So you might be able to tap into it for more than just content – but again, there are drawbacks to using it as is and being sloppy with your shortcuts.

Let’s look at some problem areas and discuss minimizing your risk.

When AI Gets It Wrong, You’d Better Not Let It Slip Through the Cracks

People using AI as their research tool is hazardous and should be avoided. They also use the content as is – another big mistake. But let’s talk about the erroneous information first.

AI can’t discern what’s true and what’s not. It’s fed massive amounts of data and then churns out content based on what it has absorbed. They admit they’re not fully current, which lags in knowledge.

Here’s an example for you. When I tasked the AI app to write tips on blogging for good SEO, it stated this as one of the tips:

“Anyone who knows online marketing knows that Google and other search engines want thorough, exhaustive content (often known as pillar blog posts) – not thin content pieces that don’t even add up to 3-4 paragraphs.”

But if all you did was copy and paste this tip into your content, you’d look foolish. Moreover, people who read that tip, who know better, would no longer trust your advice. And would want to steer clear of anything else you had to say because they’d be worried that your content was misleading.

According to one AI company, they state: “ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. In addition, it has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021. It may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”

Is AI-Generated Content True or False?

They also state: “ChatGPT will occasionally create facts or “hallucinate” outputs.” So do you want a technical tool that “hallucinates” answers or lies and gets things wrong when representing your brand online?

No. Therefore, you must not use AI tools too quickly and easily produce content. You must know the best way to prompt it and expect it to get things wrong, conduct ample research for the answers it gives you, and then write your content from scratch.

It’s no different than if you used a keyword tool and a search engine – you still are responsible for the output and what you are leading your readers to believe. These AI errors can damage your reputation and, depending on your niche, could harm your readers if you’re not careful!

Suppose someone notices that your AI-generated content is wrong. In that case, the readers can begin discussions about it. You might suffer a negative backlash from your customers – especially if you’re trying to use it to create paid products and not just a blog post.

While scummy marketers are trying to push AI tools on you with promises that you don’t have to lift a finger, you have to understand that only you care about your business – they have no remorse over whether or not you end up a laughingstock in your niche.

You have first to use only the best versions of these AI tools. They vary in quality. Some scrape and rewrite content like a spinner does. They will likely improve over time, but they’re not there yet.

You have to ensure human oversight and creative intervention whenever you’re leveraging these tools, so it’s not quite as “copy and paste” as they make it out to be. Some people find it easier to write from scratch than to start using these tools because it is time-consuming if used correctly.

AI Content Lacks the One Advantage You Could Have Over the Competition

While AI content is a neat search engine and brainstorming tool, you should use something other than AI to represent you online as your brand’s voice. In today’s world, people elevate influencers and personalities to a level above all sterile content creators who do nothing but spit out facts and figures.

To be competitive in a niche, you must have a human voice to attract an audience and lead them in their niche journey. Unfortunately, AI, even though it can write content that is easy to read, cannot inject that human voice into your content.

It can’t share stories about your grandmother’s cooking or what propelled you to pursue your online career. It can’t convey certain situations’ emotional impact, which really resonates with your readers.

Whenever you’re learning from a niche leader, these human elements determine whether you want to follow them. Anyone can read encyclopedia-like content, but they don’t choose to.

Look at the difference between this AI-created content and content published by a human blogger when asked about why someone starts a weight loss journey. The AI answers:

“There are many reasons why someone may want to lose weight. One of the most common reasons is health. Being overweight or obese can increase the risk of many health problems, such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. Losing weight can also improve overall physical function and mobility and reduce the risk of developing joint problems. In addition to health benefits, losing weight can improve one’s self-confidence, self-esteem, and overall quality of life. Some people may also want to lose weight for aesthetic reasons, such as to fit into certain clothes or feel more comfortable in their skin.”

Technically, it’s correct (in this instance), albeit as interesting as the ingredients list on a cereal box. But in today’s world, where influence and storytelling reign supreme, it can’t compete with a human personality.

An Example of Putting Personality into Content

When you do a Google search for “why I started a weight loss journey blog,” this is the top result: https://soveryblessed.com/my-weight-loss-journey. This woman talks about her journey going from an “insecure fat kid” who endured teasing and who tried all sorts of programs she failed at before she finally found the right motivations for her own life.

Suppose a consumer is looking for someone to follow. In that case, it will not be a simple fact-spouting content piece. Instead, it will be someone who has walked in their footsteps and can relate to their emotional state.

Not only that, but facts like the AI tossed out will be used by all kinds of sites, so there’s no human element being used to set them apart from one another. Only you can do that.

Even a freelancer or PLR (private label rights) provider can inject human priorities and emotions into the writing better than an artificial intelligence tool can. But, again, this is because they have the awareness and logic to do that.

So you cannot simply type prompts into AI tools and copy and paste the content. Otherwise, you will watch as your traffic dwindles as search engines bury you. Furthermore, real visitors will bounce away from your site, unimpressed with your content.

Some Freelancers Are Using AI to Scam You

Now that AI has gone mainstream in the marketplace online, many people are using it to scam unsuspecting clients out of their hard-earned money. In one example, a ghostwriter was hired to create a book for a client, only to deliver it in its entirety 24 hours later. Still, they should have remembered to remove all of the AI prompts they copied and pasted into their deliverable.

The freelancer wanted hundreds of dollars in payment, even though they had not written any content themselves. So instead, they prompted an AI tool to do the work for them.

While you may not always get the such blatant proof as the prompts remaining in the content, you can tell whether or not the content has been written by a human or by an artificial intelligence tool in many cases.

There are now tools you can use where you can copy and paste the content into them, and it will tell you if an AI

tool generated it. If you’ve ever used a tool like Copyscape, you’ll understand how this works.

You can pay a penny to $0.05 for some of these tools, paste the content into them, and see the copied content. Many universities and schools are now using AI-detection tools to prevent students from passing off computer work as their own.

Another thing that has happened in the case of graphic designers and even video production is that some freelancers are using images and otherwise copyrighted work in their production because they are allowing AI to do it for them.

In some instances, people find watermarks in the AI-created graphics content. But remember, these artificial intelligence tools can only create content based on input and cannot create things out of thin air.

You, as a human, do have the ability to be creative without having to rely on any other outside input. But unfortunately, it will be tempting for freelance service providers and private label rights sellers to use these tools to turn out content, graphics, and video modules to make a quick buck.

Therefore, if you will be using freelancers or PLR sellers, you will have to be careful to only work with people you trust. Unfortunately, there will be sellers you formally trust who end up shortcutting their work and letting you down.

Many people suspect that someday in the future, AI content will be so prevalent that those capable of claiming that human-generated content will have an advantage over those relying on artificial tools.

Why is it so crucial that a human created your content, not an AI tool? After all, Google recently gave its blessing to AI and said it would not penalize sites using it.

However, according to Google, people cannot use AI-generated content to rank well in their search engines. They also said that you should clarify to your readers that an AI machine created the content.

Google’s rules are a setback for online entrepreneurs because your purpose in publishing a high content volume is to position yourself as a niche leader with a lot of insight and knowledge.

If you then have to tell everyone in a disclosure that a machine created the content, it detracts from your credibility. Subsequently, you will lose loyalty from the target audience in your niche.

You can only expect freelance service providers to know some rules and guidelines about artificial intelligence. They won’t say they are sabotaging your business by delivering machine-generated content.

There are already numerous tools that can scan and detect AI-created content. You can expect that search engines will crawl content on your blog. They will see if you have disclosed that or if your content meets their guidelines under the “Helpful Content” update.

In most cases, AI content does not deliver on the EEAT concepts that Google holds dear to them. EEAT stands for Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness. For example, suppose a freelancer relies on a machine that may hallucinate or outright lie about facts. In that case, it isn’t conducive to helping search engines view your content as trustworthy or your blog as an authority site.

Not only do you have to worry about search engines. But you may sometimes receive a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notice, where they order you to take down the content.

Some people learned they used AI-generated content scraped from the Internet on someone else’s website. Even though some of these tools claim that you don’t have to worry about plagiarism, some results have shown plagiarized content.

Platforms Will Begin Weeding Out AI-Produced Content

Marketers are happily jumping on the trend of using AI in their business and selling courses and tools about this new technology. However, platforms are very careful about what they will and won’t allow.

Looking back on the past, you can see how Internet marketers have spoiled otherwise savvy strategies and technology with their unethical procedures. They are always looking to make a quick buck and don’t care about the consumer, end user, or the quality of what they are putting out.

They will use tools that scrape people’s websites, compile the content into a book, spin it, and publish it on Amazon, trying to make as much money as possible before their entire account gets banned.

What Media Platforms Say about AI-Generated Content

Getty Images has banned AI-generated content from its site because they worry about any legal implications of selling it. Because these tools can only curate existing information and then create from that, they are competent in banning the content from being uploaded to their site.

Google recently stated that it would not punish people for using AI-generated content after previously saying that using AI writing tools is considered spam. Therefore, they will carefully analyze posted content for quality.

The reason Google backtracked is that they were releasing their AI tool called BARD. However, in a live event, their AI tool embarrassingly delivered erroneous information in front of everyone, causing a substantial financial loss for the company.

Some marketers and writers abuse AI by trying to publish and promote fiction and make money before Amazon bans it.

When prompted to develop a plot for a romance, artificial intelligence was able to come up with a generic storyline between a man and a woman who were in love. But the storyline needed more to become a bestseller. So the writer created another prompt asking the machine to include a twist in the story.

The AI tool, lacking human discernment in what we would find disgusting, decided that the twist should be that the man and woman discovered they were brother and sister. And then, the writer had to decide whether to continue the story of their romance.

This story would only go over with a few romance readers. But if you needed to rely on AI to do the work for you, without any research into tropes that people want to see, you would become a laughingstock without making the money you had hoped to earn.

But can AI be used to help people who want to get into fiction? Of course, it can! So, for example, if you had no idea what would happen when one car T-bones another, you could ask the AI tool to write a description of it.

It could tell you what type of damage the cars sustained, and it could also inform you about what kinds of injuries the passengers may incur.

Of course, you would have to research to see if what the AI provided you were factually correct. However, the benefit of using a tool like this is that it can spur ideas or remind you to include things you may not have considered.

For example, the more details you give, the more it could paint a picture for you. So, for example, you might specify that an F150 truck was traveling 60 mph and T-boned a tiny smart car that had just pulled out into an intersection.

This type of information helps the AI tool clarify that the severity of the damage would be catastrophic for the Smart car and the passengers driving it. For example, it might mention “crumple zones,” and if you didn’t know about those, it could give you an idea to research that.

There are always unethical people who try to game a system. For example, on Amazon, many marketers tried to do what was known as “book stuffing.” Book stuffing is inflating the number of pages read and ultimately increasing their income.

They will eventually identify AI-generated, low-quality automated content and somehow put restrictions on that, whether you are publishing fiction or nonfiction books.

Even if many platforms are not currently banning AI-generated content, the massive abuse and low-quality content flooding their platforms will eventually cause a clampdown.

Risk Management Tips for Using AI in Marketing

Based on what we have discussed, there are pros and cons to utilizing AI technology in your online business. You don’t have to forego it entirely. Still, it would be best if you were wise when using it in any form of content creation, whether text, graphics, or video.

Think of how you can mitigate the risks associated with artificial intelligence so that you aren’t sabotaging your business now or in the future or damaging your reputation with consumers who follow you.

Start by ensuring that you are not relying only on these tools to do your work. They are not meant for content creation in full. Instead, it would be best if you had direct input into the message associated with your content.

You also want to ensure that even if you are using it for ideas and brainstorming, you have a great deal of oversight into the facts you choose to use when it’s presented.

You still want to have a heavy hand in how the branding and voice are delivered to your audience. Sterile content can’t compete with personality. Use AI as a side tool rather than allowing it to take over your brand entirely.

As more and more people learn about AI and use it (poorly), you’ll have fewer pieces of original content published online – especially for popular niche topics. Instead, you’ll have people teaching the same prompts and AI tools delivering almost identical content that fails to set you apart from anyone else.

You also want to mitigate your risk by learning how to use the tools then and adequately staying abreast of all rules and guidelines being discussed by various platforms. Even if you can get away with something right now, it doesn’t mean a future clampdown won’t occur.

Imagine creating hundreds of pages for your blog or uploading dozens of books onto Amazon, only to find your site buried or your account shut down because of your reliance on AI.

You don’t want to be left in a lurch, panicking because there’s no way to fix all that content before a severe update occurs. But, unfortunately, they rarely give you advance notice, instead choosing to dole out consequences for those trying to game the system.

Resources

1. Hemingway Editor
2. Grammarly
3. Worldprofit AI