Marketers Are Losing Their Voice: How AI is Turning Ideas into Static

When faced with a blank page, it’s easy to want to find a shortcut. Something to get your ideas down quickly. An aid to your ramblings, taking your muddied thoughts and sculpting a coherent message.

Enter AI, man’s new best friend (sorry dogs). Not only can it help flesh out your ideas, but AI can stitch together topics from thin air!

Except where is it sourcing the information from? Sure it sometimes lists sources, and those links sometimes even work, but beyond that, who wrote the piece? Was it a person, or was AI referencing content generated by AI.

As of late, the answer is AI.

The AI Echo Chamber - It Loves The Sound of Its Own Voice

Even though AI Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, have only been widely adopted since November 2022, AI-generated content has already spread rapidly across the internet. A study by Graphite found that as of November 2024 more articles are created by AI than Humans.

Not only does this mean human writers now have to compete against AI content, but that AI-generated content is now being trained off AI generated content. This circular training loop, perfectly named the AI Slop Loop by Lily Ray, is like a group C+ students teaching each other. They are unaware of their shortcomings and the errors in their logic, the misremembered quotes, or ill fact checked statistics get passed on. So the basis of your research becomes faulty, and as AI takes the driver's seat, your unique ideas are distilled down until they sound like everyone else. The novel perspective and unique angles you had strived to speak to are gone and with it the value.

What is it saying?

This is my usual first question when I see someone glossed over by the “AI magic”

Oftentimes they have to read the copy a few times before they can find the main points. Even then, it's less than clear whose voice it is, or who it is supposed to be speaking to. It sounds good, sure, but it reads flat because it reads like everything else. That’s because AI is designed to mimic humans based on probability. The more times something has been said, the more likely it will repeat it. Great for basic ideas like the “sky is blue” but when you need to dabble in the nuance of the gray, you will probably end up in black or white. Ironic I know as the output will be anything but clear.

Nobody Remembers Average

One of the goals of marketing is to be memorable. You want your product or service to live rent free in the minds of potential customers. Better yet, you want them to whistle your jingle as they walk down the street, providing free advertisement to those around them. The clever punchlines and skits you crafted landing not once, but over and over as friends reminisce, laughing as they recall your commercial. You want people to belt out your slogan, or pause to read what you have to say when they see your brand. You want your voice to be heard, but most of all you want it to be remembered.

Most marketers are missing the mark. Under tight deadlines, and pressure from management to cut costs with AI, they are outsourcing their research and analysis. Instead of taking inspiration from what exists and forming a unique narrative, they are trusting AI to do the thinking.

That’s the problem, because coming up with novel ideas is exactly what AI cannot do.

Novelty Is Underrated

In a conversation with Steve Eisman, cognitive scientist and AI critic Gary Marcus puts it simply: LLMs are “autocomplete on steroids.” AI has a great memory. It can recall, pattern-match, and surface the most referenced idea on any topic within seconds. What it cannot do is analyze. It has no framework for understanding why something is true, only that it has been said, and said often.

So when you ask AI to find the angle, it finds the most common one. When you ask it to do the thinking, it borrows someone else's. As Marcus put it: "Most things that are interesting in the world involve some measure of novelty." AI, by design, gravitates toward the opposite.

What you get is average, delivered with the confidence of being unique. It isn't. It's a summary. And the problem with summaries isn't just that they're forgettable, they're easy to duplicate. Anyone can produce one, including Google.

The Pressure to Produce is Making The Echo Louder

Writing takes time. Good writing takes longer. Right now, time is being viewed as an unnecessary expense.

“Just ask AI”, “Have AI write it”, “AI can do the research”

These are said with such confidence as if it's the only way forward. That time must be cut, and that quality won’t be lost. Yet the promise only handles the former.
As AI overviews continue to capture top of funnel queries (search terms related to basic information), content writers and SEO professionals are scrambling to drum up traffic.

“Since content is not driving as much traffic, we just need to create more content”

Or worse yet “We should stop writing content as the ROI isn’t good anymore.”

Both statements are faulty in their own right, but especially the first. It's natural that in a world where AI is being touted in every facet of our life that the only way out is to use more of it. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

In fact as more writers succumb to writing themselves out of the process, content becomes closer to the mean.

And if they drop out… AI fills the gap and that content is picked up by AI and fed to your competitor, and to everyone until we all sound the same.

How Marketers Can Save Their Voice While Embracing AI

Let’s be clear, I am not anti AI. In fact I use it quite frequently. I’ll even admit I used it to help write some of this blog.

What I am against is the outsourcing of participation. When working with AI, we should be collaborative. You bring ideas, analysis based on research, and a unique perspective. When it responds, your role becomes a critic. See past the sing-song glamour of its output, the confidence it exudes. Demand it integrates your ideas, and speaks with your voice. Better yet, edit what it returns. Bounce ideas off it. Use it as a starting point, then take it somewhere it couldn’t go on its own.

Just don’t expect it to do everything, or if you do, know that you are in a cave, and soon you will hear your own echo.

Logan Williams

Logan Williams is the founder of Eleventh Peak Digital. As a technical SEO expert trained in website development, he specializes in optimizing sites from code to copy to help clients grow leads. You can find Logan's latest thoughts on LinkedIn.