Marketers, especially professional services marketers, learn to get very good at getting a lot done with little: little time, little staff, little budget. Our campaigns help our firms grow. That growth spurs increased demand for our marketing services, but rarely do our budgets and headcount grow at the same rate.
So we parcel out parts of our campaigns to contractors or agencies to boost our bandwidth. We introduce project requests and management processes to enforce some structure and prevent sticking points. Technology and AI marketing tools are where we usually find relief.
This was my experience 20 years ago when I started down my marketing path as a graphic designer. I was working with small clients whose small budgets didn’t get in the way of their big ambitions. We didn’t have the utility of AI, but we discovered royalty-free stock photography.
Unfortunately, the relief came at a cost of which I was completely unaware.
When Cheap and Easy Weakens Your Brand
Before free stock photo sites existed, professional photography was expensive: studio shoots, on-site photography, staged sessions with paid models. All of it cost big bucks that scared small clients.
Royalty-free images from iStock (followed by free options we have now), seemed like the perfect solution. Clients loved the cost savings. We marketers loved the convenience. But, after a couple of years of widespread adoption, a couple problems began to surface.
First, a handful of similar images started showing up everywhere. The hand holding a globe. The smiling multicultural professionals huddled around a conference table. The ubiquitous handshake closing the deal. Everyone from lawyers to landscapers are using similar images to promote themselves. The effect confused the market and weakened brands.
Second, audiences became good at spotting these contrived photos. They judged companies using them as cheap, lazy, and not worthy of their business.
A 2011 marketing research study tested this directly. Authentic photos of real people dramatically outperformed stock photos in conversion rates. The researchers put it this way: “They know Smiley McHeadset doesn’t really work for your company. They know she’s a paid model and is likely smiling in an ad for a bank and a billboard for a credit card as well. Do you think that deepens the trust with your company?”
Now, 20 years later, we have shifted from iStock to AI.
Same Relief, Same Risks
AI content systems offer the same relief for the same bandwidth and budget constraints. Technology promises to solve our capacity problems, but it’s creating the same problems we learned from our early use of cheap stock photo services.
Your audience is already getting good at spotting lazy AI content. They’re scrolling through LinkedIn, reading emails, looking at social media, and thinking: “AI wrote this, and they didn’t even bother to read it first.” Then they close the tab and move on.
If your AI branding reflects this kind of lazy AI content creation, you’re damaging your brand credibility every time.
Erase These Sloppy AI Fingerprints
Here’s what people notice when they encounter lazy AI content:
Em-dash explosion. For whatever reason, large language models love the em-dash. Real people use commas, semicolons, parentheses and periods. Replace those em-dashes with whichever of these is most grammatically appropriate.
Weird formatting quirks. Random hanging indents one space off. Inconsistent line spacing. Telltale signs someone copied and pasted without looking.
Emoji overload. When you get an email with eight emojis scattered through the text, you know the sender was more AI than human…or my kids sent it potentially.
Bullet point blow-outs. AI loves making lists. Three things. Five ways. Seven steps. Authentic human writing flows in sentences and paragraphs unless there’s a genuine reason for a list.
The “it’s not just X, it’s Y” construction. AI trying to sound profound. “It’s not just content creation, it’s a completely new way to reframe how you create stuff.” Humans don’t talk like this… at least not every other paragraph.
Too many brass tacks. AI loves wrapping up with “but here’s the deal,” “here’s what really matters,” or “the reality is.” The textbook version of a conclusion.
Metaphor mixing. “Navigating the landscape while leveraging your toolkit” = ??? AI assembles words based on prediction, not meaning.
The moment someone realizes they’re reading AI-generated content, they usually disengage. They stop caring and move on. Frankly, if you didn’t put effort and thought into your content, why should your audience invest their time in consuming it?
Recent neuroscience research on AI-generated advertising confirms that belief. Consumers immediately identified most AI-generated ads as artificial, even without prompting. Brain scans showed weak memory activation even for high-quality AI ads. Most telling: viewers felt less positive toward brands using AI content. Researchers called it a “negative halo effect.”
Your audience might not consciously identify every AI tell, but their brains detect the mismatch. That detection damages trust in ways that compound over time.
Lazy AI Content Dilutes Brands, Creates Commodities
The core problem with lazy AI use mirrors what happened with cheap stock photos: careless overuse confuses clients and weakens their relationship with our brands.
AI models are trained on vast amounts of overlapping information. When you submit a lazy prompt like “write me a 1,000-word article on cybersecurity requirements for accounting firms,” you get output from the same common source as everyone else using similar lazy prompts.
This is why so much AI content reads the same. Competitors use the same tools, get similar outputs, and publish near-identical content.
What makes AI-assisted content stand out is human perspective. Your firm’s unique take on accounting principles and cybersecurity requirements. The specific experience with clients and your unique point of view.
So you vow to abandon lazy prompts and no longer accept generic AI slop… and then you realize your firm doesn’t really have a perspective. You just do taxes and audits. Pretty operational, routine stuff.
This realization is huge as it reveals your firm likely has what we call a “zombie brand.” You’re competing on execution in a market where everyone claims similar expertise. Clients judge you as offering commodities, which means you’re leaving margin on the table.
The AI content problem is exposing a deeper brand strategy problem. I’ll get back to this in a minute.
How to Use AI Without Damaging Your Brand
I’m not saying you should stop using AI tools. They’re useful for speeding up and improving your content creation process. Consider approaching the process like a fine dining experience, not a fast food drive-through window.
Start with your perspective. Before asking AI to write anything, get clear on what you actually think. What’s your firm’s unique angle? What have you learned from experience that others might not know? This is the foundation of effective AI branding: use the technology to amplify your perspective, not replace it.
Use AI for structure, not substance. AI can help organize ideas, create outlines, offer suggestions and unblank the page. The actual insights need to come from you. Your experiences, perspective, and voice; AI can’t replicate you, and clients want you.
Edit ruthlessly. If you use AI to draft content, treat that draft as raw marble needing significant chiseling. Remove the em-dashes. Cut unnecessary bullet points. Rewrite the emphatic refrains. Fix the metaphor mixing. Make it sound like a mature human professional, not a hyperventilating teenager.
Test for authenticity and distinctiveness. Before publishing, ask whether your competitors could have written the same thing. If yes, you haven’t added enough of your firm’s perspective.
Avoid tell-tale patterns. Instead of “three ways” or “five steps,” pick an even number. This small act of creativity signals immediately that a human made a choice.
Confronting the Deeper Issue: Your Bland Brand
If you discover your firm doesn’t have a clear perspective to filter content through, that’s valuable information. It means you’re operating as a commodity. Clients hire you for execution but don’t see you as distinctively different. Partners might think you’re competing on service quality or technical expertise, but clients are choosing based on price and availability because they can’t perceive meaningful differences.
This commodity positioning costs you margin every single day. A few percentage points here, a few there. Over time, it adds up to substantial revenue you’re leaving on the table because your brand doesn’t command premium positioning.
The rise of AI marketing and AI content is forcing this issue into the spotlight. When everyone can generate similar content instantly, the firms whose AI branding stands out are the ones with something unique to say. A clear perspective. A distinctive point of view. An authentic voice that can’t be replicated by typing a prompt into ChatGPT.
My Three-Step Recommendation (jk…it’s just two things)
First, audit recent content for the AI tells we described. Be honest about whether your audience could detect lazy AI use. Afterwards, get clear on your firm’s perspective: What do you believe about your practice area that’s different from conventional wisdom? What have you learned from client experience that you’d defend in a room full of peers? If you struggle to answer those questions, you’ve identified the real issue: it’s not AI tools… it’s the underlying brand strategy work you haven’t done yet.
Once you have that clarity, rebuild your content creation process around perspective first, tools second. Start with what you uniquely believe or know, then use AI to help structure and express those ideas efficiently. Never let AI replace the thinking that makes your content worth reading. That’s the difference between AI branding that strengthens your position and AI content that commoditizes it.
Your firm is remarkable. You have unique experience, perspective, and values that cannot be duplicated by AI or competitors. The question is whether your content reflects that remarkable quality or whether it’s adding to the noise of identical AI-generated posts cluttering everyone’s feeds.
Clients are getting better at spotting the difference every day. They’re closing tabs faster. Trusting brands less when they detect lazy content. They’re making judgments about your firm based on whether you cared enough to be authentic.
The royalty-free photo era taught us this lesson. Now, the AI content era is reteaching it. Firms that learn it will build trust and authenticity. The ones that don’t will keep wondering why their content doesn’t drive the results they desired.
