AI didn’t ruin marketing. Lazy marketers, however, might.

yes, this is a sponsored post. no, ai didn’t write it.

I swear, it feels like every marketer I know is duking it out on LinkedIn to see who can out-virtue the rest. And not over politics or religion, but over something pettier, and somehow even more vicious: whether using AI makes you a “bad” marketer.

I’ll admit it: I use AI all the time. Some days it feels like an embarrassing dependence. And yes, I’ve wrestled with the guilt, wondering whether or not this reliance make me less creative, less rigorous, less me? There’s also that gnawing thought that maybe I’m single-handedly overheating the planet every time I type a lazy query instead of Googling like a normal person. But guilt and laziness have been around long before AI. And if you’re lazy with a blank sheet of paper, you’ll be lazy with a chatbot. If you’re thoughtful, you’ll still be thoughtful. Can’t say much about this planet—we’re doing the absolute worst, and nothing I write here will make that feel any better.

But I digress.

I can always tell when someone’s post was written by AI. Or at least, I convince myself I can. It’s not the em dashes (though I curse the day people started treating them like some kind of contraband), because anyone who actually reads knows they’re a stylistic choice. It’s more like being able to catch the rhythm of writing. Or noticing how paragraphs are sliding too easily into each other. Or sentences forming this weirdly perfect cadence. Which is exactly why it never feels human. It’s too perfect.

You know what I mean, right? In business writing, it’s the over-optimizing for corporate consumption. The faux hype of saying a lot while saying nothing at all. The rule of three, the fake rhetorical questions. Then the AI witch hunts: smug posts with virtual pitchforks, everyone acting like TSA agents confiscating a full tube of toothpaste. The poor writer swearing with their hand on the bible that they ACTUALLY wrote this themselves. The rest of us are left, existing with this low-level paranoia.

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📌brought to you by Typeform (#TypeformPartner). they’re running a “get real” survey on generative ai — the paranoia, the guilt, the weird pride in insisting you’re still human. they want messy, unfiltered responses (text, video, audio, whatever). if you’ve got an opinion:

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That paranoia, and the guilt that keeps us up at night, is pretty much marketing in a nutshell. Most of us got into this line of work because we’re wired to be creative. We’re the kind of people who’d binge Mad Men and take notes on those perfectly brutal taglines. We’ll waste an hour rewriting a headline just to make it sting a bit harder for the mic drop. (I’ve rewritten the beginning of this essay at least 12 times and I still hate it.) We’ll argue about fonts like our lives depend on it, then get weirdly excited over a clever ad and spend the rest of the week debating with other marketers about whether the latest social stunt was brilliant or a total flop. The industry grows increasingly obsessed with volume and speed. More, more, MORE. Faster, faster, FASTER. The work itself turns into a chase for quantity over quality, and we’re strapped to the treadmill at an incline, cranked to a speed that’ll surely send us straight into cardiac arrest (ask me how I know).

Generative AI is lodged right in that mess, sitting comfortably and always available. It rescues us from the blinking cursor, sure, but it also fuels the content mill, spitting out drafts at a pace that makes the hamster wheel spin even faster. It frees up time for “strategy”—whatever that word even means when everyone seems to be doing the same shit with a different logo—but it also worms its way into our insecurities. We start leaning on it for reassurance, which, bluntly, feels pathetic. Tell me this headline works, tell me I’m being innovative. It’s no wonder we feel split in two. Between the work we want to make and the system that demands we keep feeding the machine.

For me, the part worth protecting is the only part that makes this work valuable: taste.

The flex of knowing what quality looks like. Knowing what to cut, what to keep, what’s worth saying. AI can spit out fifty one-liners, but it can’t tell you which one people will actually repost, or which one will stop a scroll. It can’t decide which words strung together make your voice stand out. That’s the human layer. The work of revising, reworking, re-seeing until it finally feels like you.

So yes, I rely on AI. And I’m not the only one—plenty of marketers in 2025 have already admitted the same. But that doesn’t mean you get to coast. This thing was never meant to replace the muscle, it was just supposed to keep us moving in a business already addicted to output. The job hasn’t changed. You still need to spot the bullshit, and cut the fluffy filler. You gotta trust the instincts that no machine can simulate.

Generative AI can flood the page with words. Our job is to make sure they don’t all blur into the same bland beige feed.

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p.s. if you’ve got your own tangled feelings about ai in marketing, i’m partnering with typeform to collect them. same survey i dropped earlier — here’s the link again.