How not to be just another AI clone
For the past few months, I’ve been consuming more content about AI in marketing than any nutritionist would ever recommend. Webinars, courses, podcasts, reports, academic papers, expert newsletters…
After months of dissecting all these “must-follow” tips, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth.
It feels like marketing is heading exactly where it shouldn’t.
Why did we stop being different?
For years, the core of marketing was about finding differences. It was about spotting things others hadn’t noticed yet, discovering new perspectives, and uncovering advantages the competition had overlooked. But today, the dominant AI narrative is focused on the opposite: standardization, scaling production, and optimizing everything for the algorithm.
I understand the logic. But what about the consequences?
When everyone starts cooking with the exact same ingredients, the result is predictably bland. If every brand builds its own GPT, automates content production, and generates hundreds of ideas a day, the result is mostly volume.
It’s content that feels stale before anyone even gets a chance to try it. It’s hard to remember because it rarely has any real flavor.
In the AI world, we keep hearing about the feedback loop—models learning from content generated by other models, making every response look a little more like the last.
Marketing increasingly seems to be falling into the same trap.
We all have access to an almost unlimited number of ingredients, yet we’re serving remarkably similar dishes. Scroll through a dozen AI posts on LinkedIn and, after a few minutes, everything starts to blur together.
Value over scale: The new rules of the game
Being different has always been the most valuable currency in marketing. Efficiency helps you grow, but it’s standing out that makes a brand memorable.
That’s why I’m taking a contrarian approach to much of the AI advice circulating today. Instead of asking how to implement it, I’m asking: what’s a better alternative?
The “Expert” Advice | My Alternative |
|---|---|
Build your own brand GPT. | Define your point of view first. AI won’t fix a lack of strategy; it’ll just help you scale your mistakes faster. |
Optimize for GEO so AI cites you. | Create content that’s actually worth citing. Build something worth people’s time and attention. |
Use AI to generate 100 ideas a day. | Use AI to kill 99 of them. Your edge isn’t the number of ideas—it’s your taste, your judgment, and the courage to reject the mediocre. |
Automate your entire content process. | Automate everything except the parts that require actual thinking. Intuition and context remain some of the last truly human advantages. |
Build a library of prompts. | Build a library of questions that gives you a lasting intellectual edge. |
Use AI for faster research. | Use AI to challenge your research findings. The problem isn’t a lack of answers—it’s that they’re increasingly starting to sound the same. |
AI will help you create expert content. | AI will help you create content that looks expert. That’s a crucial difference. The easier it becomes to manufacture signals of expertise, the more valuable genuine expertise becomes. |
Do you have the guts to be different?
The history of marketing isn’t written by those who followed the rules best. It belongs to those who recognized when the market had become oversaturated with the same taste because everyone was serving the exact same dish.
Everyone seems to be serving the same dish. And marketing has never rewarded brands for tasting like everyone else.