You may have several reasons for using AI in your marketing and branding. Some adopted AI to save money; some chose AI to streamline their workflow. Still others jumped on board simply because everyone else did, and they were afraid to be left behind. No matter your reason for making AI part of your marketing and branding efforts, you’re one of millions who’ve made the same choice.

And that may be the very thing that harms your brand.

Generative AI Is an Equalizer, Not an Elevator

Among the many ways brands choose to use AI is content generation. Blogs, videos, images—all of these can be created with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cutting production time from hours to mere minutes.

That probably still sounds so appealing that you haven’t stopped to consider what that AI-generated content is doing to your brand.

You understand how AI works. It must be trained on millions and millions of words, images, and video created by humans. Some of those humans were brilliant, while others may not know the difference between “you’re” and “your.” Still, AI gathers all of this information and uses it to generate the content you desire according to your specifications.

This means, no matter how direct and complex your specifications may be, any work returned to you is derived from the work of others. Mark Twain once wrote, “There is no such thing as a new idea.” When you use AI to create your content, you prove the man correct.

AI Threatens Content Quality, Messaging, and Brand Voice

When you consider the fact that AI content has leveled the playing field—even for those who were once operating on a superior plane—then you can begin to understand how other aspects of your branded content could be affected.

Middle ground means that all of your once carefully crafted and curated material begins to sound just like every other AI user out there. What once set you apart from your competitors gets lost in the great shift toward engagement metrics rather than brand differentiation.

And when your differentiators disappear into a sea of sameness, your strategic brand messaging will also begin to erode. You probably won’t notice at first, as you’ve worked hard to this point to create goodwill and secure customer loyalty. Eventually, however, all the research you did to understand your buyers and their needs—the very reasons they buy from you and not your competitors—will drift away.

AI just can’t replicate the human experience. It can’t understand cultural nuances and emotional context. Your brand connections will begin to feel forced, and then false, and then they’ll disappear altogether.

Google’s Stance on AI Continues to Evolve

AI doesn’t just have the ability to hurt your content through diluted brand messaging. It can also dilute your brand’s online presence. Right now, perhaps, you’re still coasting along with Google unaware of your AI generated content.

Google will likely—eventually—come for you. Their stance is in a constant state of flux, but AI users that pasted low-effort, unoriginal content that didn’t add much value to their website have already felt the burn. In Google’s March 2024 Core Update, low-quality, unoriginal content was reduced by 45%, meaning Google simply wiped it from their search results pages.

When your brand can no longer be found in search results, how strong will it be then?

AI and Poor Personalization Tactics

If you’ve ever received an email addressed to [First_Name] or, worse, someone else entirely, then you can probably skip this section. You already know how infuriated customers get when personalization goes wildly wrong.

The promise of AI personalization often goes deeper than missing or incorrect names, though. AI relies on pristine data to work correctly for personalization and automation. When one piece of the puzzle is missing, AI will either jumble the rest or create a whole new image.

Suddenly, your buyers start receiving upselling emails regarding products or services they’ve never purchased, offers for new products that don’t fit their buyer profiles or history, and the dreaded emails addressed to the wrong person or [First_Name].

All that work spent creating buyer personas and profiles to provide a personalized experience and increase buyer trust—down the drain. And with 58% of retailers saying their data is incomplete, that’s a lot of consumer trust on deck to disappear.

How to Preserve Your Brand and Use AI

There really is only one way to continue using AI without harming your brand, and that’s constant, informed, human oversight.

A human must examine all content for errors, AI hallucinations, brand terminology, and voice. The message must be studied and tweaked so as not to lose its edge. Data must be inspected and personal profiles completed…by a human. And not just a human—a human who has expertise in the matter at hand, whether brand voice and messaging, data analytics, or personalization and automation.

The more often a human is involved in the process, the more unshakeable your brand will be, but then, that’s always been the case. Don’t give up your hard-fought market share and brand recognition in favor of the “easy” road. You may find all too quickly that brand dilution costs much more than human labor.

If you’d like to learn more, reach out any time.