In response to my recent email about AI disillusionment, a reader asked me to mansplain a bit more.
Why am I so chill when the rest of the freelancing and marketing world sees ChatGPT as a hooded executioner?
Here goes, ladies and gentlemen:
Pretend you want to bake banana bread but…
- You don’t know how to bake banana bread.
- You don’t even know how to bake.
- Heck… you don’t even know what a banana is.
So what do you do?
You watch 10 YouTube Shorts on how to bake banana bread and combine the methods and ingredients into the perfect recipe.
Problem is, people make mistakes.
You copied part of your recipe from a video that miscalculated the cooking temperature.
Now YOUR banana bread recipe is only 80% accurate.
D’oh!
…But you post your own banana bread tutorial anyway.
The Problem Compounds
Now, somebody else comes along, and they want to make banana bread.
They pull up 10 videos… and look—your video is there, too!
So now the pool of information is diluted with two “kind of bad but not horrible” options.
YouTube Star #2 copies your mistakes…
And THEIR video is 50% accurate.
And so on…
Until eventually…
YouTube’s banana bread search results are filled with recipes that don’t even contain bananas.
This is how AI learns.
AI companies have burned through human data. Now? They’re training AI… with AI.
And every time they do, the model gets dumber.
The AI Feedback Loop of Doom
The fix?
“We need more investor money so we can use AI to make AI data, and then fix AI with AI!”
Fantastic.
More fake data for our banana-less banana bread bots.
They’re just copying The Matrix at this point.
To me?
AI’s looking more and more like the next dot-com bubble.
But this isn’t an economics newsletter.
This list is about mediocre comedy dusted with hints of marketing wisdom.
So…
Why Are You Wasting Time Fixing AI’s Mistakes?
If you have to hire someone to go back and fix AI’s output so it “sounds more human”…
- It takes twice as long.
- It costs the same (or more).
- It doesn’t improve results.
So what’s the point?
This is the AI paradox nobody wants to talk about.
If you spend more time fixing AI-generated garbage than you would just writing it yourself… how is that a win?
The Role of AI in Your Business
Look… AI isn’t completely useless.
It has a place in some marketing campaigns.
But certain things?
They should be left to humans—the ones with wrinkly brains who understand nuance, persuasion, and emotion.
Like yours truly.
Clients love working with me because:
- I understand buyer psychology. (AI knows stats. I know humans.)
- I understand the entire marketing ecosystem. (Not just one piece of it.)
- I put bananas in my banana bread. (AI doesn’t.)
These are the three key factors to winning more customers.
When you’re ready to step off the AI Hype Train and use marketing strategies that actually work, here’s what to do next:
👉 Join my daily email list:
You’ll get sharp, no-BS marketing insights that help you sell more—without depending on a banana-free robot.
Perfectly ripe with no brown spots,
Nick
