When AI Makes Bad Marketing Look Good
The experience of competence without the substance.
By now a lot of us can spot AI slop in marketing. It’s the poster with five fonts, an image that’s a bit off and shows zero restraint. We recognize it quickly and often write it off as amateur or unprofessional.
But, there’s another kind of AI slop that I’ve seen creep into marketing, and I think it could be even more damaging.
The Sales Deck Example
A company I was working with decided to forgo outside marketing support and build their next sales presentation with AI instead. The output was quick, and it looked and felt polished. It was directionally relevant and nothing in it was obviously ‘wrong’. That was part of the problem. When they handed it to the sales team for feedback, the rep didn’t even know where to start. There was no real substance underneath it to fix. Thirty slides that said essentially nothing.
This is the kind of AI slop that worries me. In this case, AI didn’t completely miss the mark. In some ways, that would have been easier to spot. The problem was that it got close enough to ‘feel’ right. AI had made bad marketing look good. While the person who built this deck thought it was great, he didn’t have the experience to know it wasn’t. That’s the skill of marketing judgement that is not replaceable by AI.
The Experience of Competence
Kyle Vamvouris calls this the ‘experience of competence’. AI hands you something with volume and polish in seconds. It makes you feel incredibly competent. But the catch is if you don’t have enough experience to challenge what you are looking at, to question, edit, refine and iterate, you risk putting out materials, messaging and strategies that fail.
And the volume makes it worse. Forty pages feels more substantial than four. A detailed framework feels more rigorous than a simple answer. AI can manufacture all of those signals of competence incredibly quickly.
AI Can’t Replace Judgement
AI has made output cheap, but it hasn’t replaced judgement. In some ways, it has made judgement more important because bad marketing can now look remarkably good. I believe an experienced marketer is even more valuable in this age of AI-generated work. The ability to produce volume is easy. The ability to recognize what is actually worth keeping, what needs work and what should never see the light of day, is not.
Ultimately, the goal isn't just to produce content, it's to produce results. When we allow AI to bypass the critical thinking phase, we risk shipping messaging that feels generic, strategic frameworks that are hollow, and campaigns that fail to resonate. The long-term cost of this shortcut isn't just a wasted project; it's a gradual erosion of brand trust and market credibility that is incredibly difficult, and expensive, to recover.
