I got fooled first.
We were paying freelance writers good money to create content for our clients. Then ChatGPT 3.5 dropped, and suddenly these writers started delivering articles faster than ever. The quality looked solid at first glance. We were impressed.
Until we noticed something odd.
They all started sounding the same. The output improved, but the thinking behind the words didn’t. More words, less substance. That’s when I realized what was happening—our writers had discovered the push-button content machine and stopped doing the hard work of actually thinking.
We had to stop using them and started experimenting with AI ourselves. What I learned over the past 18 months changed how I think about content creation for local businesses.
The Seduction of Push-Button Content
Right now, agencies and SaaS companies are flooding local business owners with offers that sound incredible: automated content systems that promise to solve your visibility problems while you sleep.
For a chiropractor struggling to get in front of new patients, or a home builder trying to stand out in a crowded market, this sounds like the answer to everything.
It’s not.
With AI, creating content is no longer the problem. Content is easy now. You can generate thousands of words in minutes. The real challenge is perspective, wisdom, a point of view, and expertise: the human elements that make content worth reading.
Here’s what I’m seeing in the trenches: a significant portion of consumers reduce their engagement with content they believe AI produced. Many of your potential customers are walking away because they can tell something’s off.
The automation promise is seductive because it targets a real pain point. Before AI, content creation was expensive and slow. Unless you had a huge budget, you were limited in how much you could publish. Now content is cheap and fast.
But there’s a catch most people haven’t figured out yet.
Where Automated Content Actually Breaks
The problems show up in three ways, and they’re all expensive.
The Soulless Content Problem
AI is trained on massive amounts of content, which makes it skilled at recreating something that sounds smooth. But it lacks soul. It lacks the point of view that content written by (or at least informed by) a living human expert has.
Customers detect this faster than you think.
The obvious tells include overuse of em dashes and certain punctuation patterns. But the most harmful signal is when content uses many words to pump up weak ideas. It sounds good, but there’s nothing substantial underneath.
Not everyone can identify AI fluff, but enough people can that it’s dangerous to your business.
Consumers are increasingly able to identify AI-generated content when it lacks proper human oversight. The majority of your potential customers can tell when you’re phoning it in.
The Hallucination Crisis
AI writers hallucinate. They fabricate facts out of thin air because those facts sound good and fit the pattern of what should be true.
Without guardrails and guidance, AI will roll with a reality of its own making.
We had a prospect come to us terrified about content creation. Their previous agency took the push-button approach, and the AI-generated content made offers and guarantees that didn’t exist.
People called about these fake offers. Nobody at the clinic knew what they were talking about. Customers got angry. They left bad reviews because they felt lied to.
People who never even became customers were leaving bad reviews.
Think about how badly you have to mess up to get negative reviews from people before they walk through your door. That’s the reputation cost of unchecked automation.
The reality backs this up: most businesses worry about AI hallucinations, and even the latest models still generate false information at concerning rates. Nearly half of enterprise AI users have admitted to making at least one major business decision based on hallucinated content.
The Local Context Gap
AI doesn’t understand your community. It doesn’t know that in your region, people say “remodeling” while three states over they say “renovation”—and those terms mean different things in different markets.
It doesn’t know about the local builder’s association event that everyone in your market attended. It doesn’t understand the seasonal patterns specific to your service area. It can’t reference the community landmarks or local concerns that make content feel grounded and authentic.
Local businesses win on local relevance. Automated content strips that away and gives you generic material that could apply to any business anywhere.
When you remove the human expert from the process, you lose the business history, the specific processes and details, and the regional knowledge that makes content connect with your actual customers.
The Agency Race to the Bottom
Here’s what surprised me most: business owners aren’t the ones cutting corners with fully automated content.
It’s the agencies.
The people who should know better are the ones getting seduced by unlimited content generation. They see the opportunity to increase margins and output, and they stop pushing to make content worth reading.
That’s a tragedy.
When you’re getting paid to work on behalf of a company, you owe it to them to not take the easy way out. You still need to make content good. That doesn’t mean crafting everything unaided like we did three years ago, but it does mean holding yourself to a higher standard.
The problem is that collaborating with AI is a fundamentally different skill set than writing content yourself.
Some agencies haven’t figured this out yet. Others haven’t even realized they need to worry about it. The easy push-button content machine is too seductive, and the vast majority of digital agencies have already incorporated AI tools into their daily routines.
The agencies racing to automate everything are creating a competitive advantage for the ones who get this right.
What Actually Works: The Human-AI Collaboration Model
The good news is that AI can be an incredible tool when you use it correctly.
The key is keeping clear roles between human and AI.
The human needs to be clear on three things:
- The brand voice and how the business actually sounds
- The business processes, details, and specific context
- The point of the content and what it needs to accomplish
AI can help create the content, but it has to be an iterative back and forth. You massage the content into something true to your business goals and helpful for your readers.
I see people fail when they give a prompt and run with whatever the AI spits out. Or they try to get it to create “SEO optimized” content and publish garbage.
The trick to making something worth publishing is going back and forth with the AI, iterating and improving the piece until it’s right.
This takes longer than prompt-copy-paste. But it takes far less time than creating content by yourself used to take.
The Three Levels of AI Content Creation
Level 1: Single Prompt (Generic)
You tell AI to give you an article about X. It gives you something that sounds smooth but lacks substance. This is what most people do, and it’s why most AI content fails.
Level 2: Context-Rich Prompting (Better)
You give the AI business context and point of view in the prompt. Results improve significantly, but the content probably still isn’t incredible.
Level 3: Collaborative Iteration (Best)
The best approach involves cultivating business context databases so AI has factual business data for your specific company. You make prompts collaboratively with the AI, getting it to ask clarifying questions before anything gets written. Then you go back and forth, improving the content until it’s as good or better than anything you could have written alone.
AI is an undeniable advantage for content creation if you recognize its strengths and weaknesses.
What I’ve observed confirms this: AI content with human strategic oversight performs significantly better than fully automated output. Not marginally better, but dramatically better.
Among successful implementations, most marketers use a hybrid approach where human editors polish AI drafts and subject matter experts fact-check and refine each piece before publishing.
The Real Cost of Getting This Wrong
When Google’s Bard chatbot hallucinated during a promotional demo, Alphabet lost roughly $100 billion in market capitalization in a single day.
That’s a corporate example, but it shows the reputational stakes.
For local businesses, the costs show up differently but they’re just as real:
- Bad reviews from people who never became customers
- Erosion of trust in tight-knit communities where word spreads fast
- Wasted marketing budget on content that actively pushes people away
- Lost competitive advantage as you blend into generic noise
Many consumers are less likely to engage with content if they know AI generated it. The trust problem is measurable and significant.
In local markets where personal connections drive business, this trust erosion can be fatal.
The Window Is Closing
Here’s what worries me most: local business is incredibly important and under attack by big business.
AI has the potential to be an equalizer if you use it correctly. But if local business owners get bad advice and go down the wrong path, there will be long-term consequences.
Big businesses are using this technology. They aren’t playing around. They have teams figuring out how to leverage AI while maintaining quality and brand consistency.
The opportunity is huge right now and for the next few years. Big changes are happening in how people discover and choose local businesses. The companies that figure out human-AI collaboration will dominate their markets.
The ones that chase fully automated content will fade into irrelevance, buried under their own generic material that nobody trusts or engages with.
How to Know If You’re Doing This Right
Ask yourself one question: Does this content truly represent your brand?
If you’re working with an agency or using AI tools yourself, the content should reflect your actual expertise, your real processes, and your genuine point of view. It should sound like something you would say to a customer sitting across from you.
If it doesn’t pass that test, you’re on the wrong path.
AI content will absolutely improve over time. Eventually, it may even be possible to reduce human involvement further. But until then, make sure someone who knows how to use these tools is creating content that’s truly reflective of your brand and goals, content that’s helpful to your potential customers.
The businesses that win in the next few years will be the ones that embrace AI as a tool while keeping the human expert in the mix. They’ll use automation to eliminate drudgery and speed up processes, but they won’t relinquish the essential human qualities that build trust and drive real business growth.
Content is easy now. Perspective, wisdom, and authentic expertise are what matter.
Don’t automate away the only things that make your business worth choosing.