Let me start with something that doesn’t get said enough: Not all AI-generated content is bad. But bad AI-generated content has earned its name: AI slop.
For me, the tell is a lack of POV. AI slop is content that says a lot and means nothing. The kind that could belong to any brand, in any industry, on any given Tuesday. At best, it’s entertaining filler. At worst, it quietly erodes brand trust because audiences can feel the lack of a real point of view, even when they can’t name it.
And in my experience, that’s almost always a prompt problem.
Garbage in, garbage out
One other thing that doesn’t get said enough: There’s no shame in using AI at work.
Using AI to refine your idea is different from using AI to generate one. AI doesn’t invent strategic clarity, it amplifies whatever you hand it. No amount of better prompting fixes a strategy that was never clear in the first place. That’s how brands end up sounding like everyone else.
You’ve probably lived this example before. A brand wants to move faster, so it hands vague creative direction to AI and asks it to fill in the gaps. The output is polished, confident, and completely generic. Content that could be in any brand’s campaign, in any category. So audiences don’t engage with it, they keep scrolling. And, in my opinion, that slow erosion of attention is how brand trust quietly disappears.
The brands most at risk of losing audience trust aren’t the ones using AI too much. They’re the ones using AI to figure out what they want to say in the first place.
A strong POV scales
The brands doing this well aren’t necessarily being more careful or deliberate about AI. They’ve just done the strategic work first.
My own team is probably the best example I have. When we’re building a strategy doc, someone will drop in an outline, their stream-of-consciousness thinking, notes from our brainstorms. Everything is messy but specific. AI shapes that into a draft we can actually work from, something structured enough to react to and inspire us to do the real work ahead.
And that’s where it gets interesting. The shaping we do with AI isn’t just editing language. It’s pushing points harder. Asking AI to pressure-test the argument assuming a specific audience will be reading it. Stress-testing whether the strategy actually holds.
What that buys back isn’t just time, though that matters. We get to save our mental bandwidth for the harder questions. How does this campaign connect to everything else we’re building? Are we being consistent in the stories we’re telling? That kind of systems thinking, the understanding of how a single moment fits into a larger narrative, is exactly what AI can’t do for you. That part has to come from us.
Context is everything
I know most teams aren’t set up to co-create with AI in this way. And I think that’s largely because most AI tools aren’t either. They’re context-blind. They live outside the work, in a separate tab, on a different surface. Every prompt starts from zero. And that friction adds up fast. Every time your team has to re-explain who you are, what you’re building, and what you’re trying to say, that’s mental energy that should be going into the work itself.
The thing that changed for my team wasn’t improved discipline or prompting technique. It was having AI that already knew what we were working on because it was embedded in the work itself; our brand, our campaigns, our voice already in the room. And all of a sudden, the output stopped feeling generic. It started feeling like ours.
AI doesn’t build brands. People do.
The most successful brands understand that AI is just a tool in service of their vision. Not the brain behind it.
Great brands are built by people with taste, judgment, and a sense of ownership over the work. People who are willing to say something specific, take a position, and commit to a point of view even when it’s a little uncomfortable.
So the question I’d ask any brand leader right now isn’t “How do we use AI better?” It’s “Do we actually know what we want to say?” Because if the answer is yes, if you’ve done the work to know who you are and what you stand for, AI multiplies that. You don’t have to choose between moving fast and staying true to your brand. You just have to show up with something real to say.
The antidote to AI slop was never better AI. It’s clearer thinking. And that part has always been on us.
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