The unintended consequences of AI: Are marketers relying too much on it? (Brains Byte Back podcast)

With the rise of AI-generated content, the term “authentic” has evolved. It’s now used to differentiate between human-made (aka real) content and what’s created by machines. AI tools like ChatGPT, Canva, Google Docs, and even LinkedIn have made content creation easier than ever, making it tempting to just click, generate, and post. The downside? You risk losing authenticity—and if you’re a brand, it’s affecting your SEO rankings too.

In this episode of Brains Byte Back, we connect with marketing expert Usman Amjad about the unintended but very real consequences of relying too heavily on AI in marketing. Amjad points out that AI has been around for decades in the form of Google search rankings and Netflix recommendations. Now, with the rise of generative AI tools, marketing has become more accessible, faster, and scalable by allowing brands and users to generate ad copy, blog posts, and social media content efficiently.

However, he explains the impact it’s having on diminishing creativity and the ability to effectively connect to an audience when brands allow AI to do all the work for them. While we recognize that the technology draws from existing patterns, this leads to creating similar content across the board, resulting in generic, cookie-cutter marketing that lacks originality. The outcome is that brands and even people begin to look and sound alike, with blogs and social media posts following the same structure and wording.

Amjad emphasizes that these tools are valuable when paired with strategies that use AI as a creative assistant—offering ideas, not making decisions—and stressing the importance of fact-checking everything to ensure accuracy, as no AI tool is immune to error.

We also discuss how AI is predicted to disrupt the future of online search. The numbers suggest that traditional search engine volume will dip 25% by 2026 as AI and other virtual assistants gain traction. Including how Google is now optimizing for AI summaries at the top of search results, which influences user behavior and SEO strategies. Noting that while AI-driven searches are changing the landscape, traditional organic rankings still matter, creating a balance for marketers.

Whether you’re creating content for a brand or yourself, this episode offers great insight on how to effectively balance the evolving technology to empower your creativity, not stifle it.

You can listen to the full episode below, or on Spotify, Anchor, Apple Podcasts, Breaker,, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, Listen Notes, PodBean, and Radio Public.

Find out more about Usman Amjad here.

Connect with Brains Byte Back host Erick Espinosa here.

TRANSCRIPT:

Erick Espinosa  

Amazing. Usman. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Brains Byte Back. To those listening, Usman is actually a good friend of mine and a marketing whiz, and that says a lot, because I have a lot of friends in marketing, which I think might just be a Gemini thing, in communications, marketing, advertising. He’s been in the industry for a long time now, as he mentioned, for over a decade now, and has seen how AI has revolutionized his line of work. 

Here on Brains Byte Back, we’ve had many conversations with software developers and creators about the great benefits about using AI as a marketing tool. But I want to shift gears here today and ask, is it possible for marketers to overuse AI, and if so, what are the results? Basically, can AI be too much of a good thing? Uzman, how are you? Thanks again. So much for joining us. I really appreciate your time. 

I want to get a little bit more insight in terms of how AI has been leveraged in the marketing industry in recent years. Somebody like me, imagine it’s like marketing 101, that now includes AI. How has it changed? 

Usman Amjad 

Sure. So AI has actually been around for decades. It’s just that most people didn’t really notice it. Traditional AI is what powers things like Google search rankings, spam filters in your email and even Netflix recommendations. It’s basically a set of complex algorithms designed to analyze data and make decisions. But what’s changed in recent years is generative AI, which is what most people now mean when they talk about AI. And unlike traditional AI, which just analyzes data, generative AI actually creates new content, and that’s why we’re seeing tools like chat GPT for text, Dolly or Mid Journey for images and Runway for video editing. And these models don’t just pull from existing data. They generate completely new text, images and even voices based on what they’ve learned. So for marketing, this means that AI isn’t just optimizing strategies, it’s actively shaping the content people see and engage with, right. So brands can now generate ad copy, blog posts, social media captions, and even entire video ads in minutes using AI. So this has basically made marketing more accessible, faster and scalable than ever before.

Erick Espinosa  

I feel like the key word here is efficient. Ai, in all industries, is making things a lot more efficient. The great thing about within marketing, you guys use a lot of data to help you understand your your audience. Right now, there’s a lot of tools you know to create content. Would you say that a lot of these same tools are being used? Like, what are the most popular tools right now being used by marketers? You would say.

Usman Amjad  

I mean, I could say, from personal experience, Chat GPT is probably number one on that list. There’s also similar tools like Perplexity.ai that’s similar to chatgpt, but provides references and sources to all of the data it pulls. I’m a creative person as well, so I do a lot of graphic design. I use mid journey, which is a generative Image tool. But then there’s also AI that’s being built into tools that many of us know and use, like Canva, for instance, very popular, been around for a while, but now has all of these new, integrated AI features. But I would say those, those three, are definitely some of the top used AI tools right now in marketing, 

Erick Espinosa  

But those are tools that, like you get a lot of the information they’re getting is information that’s being fed to them from online. So the information that most marketers are accessing is a lot of the same thing. What’s the result? Because you mentioned that, basically this can cause issues in terms of maybe brands looking the same issues with creativity. Can you expand on that? 

Usman Amjad   

Yeah, exactly. With so many marketers using the same AI tools, we’re starting to see a real problem where everything is starting to look and sound the same. AI is great at generating content, but it pulls from existing patterns, like you said, which means it tends to produce generic, safe content that lacks originality.

A great example is AI generated blog posts. If you search for common marketing topics, you’ll notice that many articles have almost the same structure, wording and even examples, and that’s because they’re often generated or heavily assisted by the same AI models like chat, GPT or Gemini. We’re also seeing this a lot in social media. LinkedIn, for example, is now flooded with posts that follow the same formula. You know, I used to think x, but then I realized y, and here’s what I learned. 

Erick Espinosa  

Even emojis, honestly, like I was thinking about that I feel like last week, and then I started to notice that, because I’m being more active on LinkedIn. But you’re right, a lot of the posts do look the same. 

Usman Amjad  

Yeah, AI generated captions often sound polished, but lack personality, which makes them now easier to scroll past. And you know, even in design tools like Canva, their AI templates are making branding more accessible, but they’re also creating a sea of look alike graphics and ads. You know, if every brand is pulling from the same AI generated pool, it becomes harder to stand out.

Erick Espinosa

So when I think of it, a lot of people that are just starting, let’s say a business, and they’re doing their own marketing, or if they have or, you know, let’s say if you’re new to marketing and you’re, you know, just dipping your feet in it. How would you as a leader, make sure that you’re preventing this from happening, that you’re, you’re still kind of, you’re trying to make a brand stand out.

Usman Amjad 

Yeah, that’s a real challenge, especially for beginners or small businesses that don’t really have a marketing background. AI makes things so easy that it’s tempting to assume it always gets things right, but it doesn’t. AI doesn’t know anything. It just predicts the most likely answer based on patterns in the data it’s been trained on. As mentioned, you know, there’s tools out there like perplexity.ai which are similar to ChatGPT, but always provide sources and references to the information it provides. But as a leader, you know, I ran a paid agency, paid advertising agency, for, you know, nine years, and in the last few years, AI was becoming a lot more prevalent, and a lot of my staff members were using tools like ChatGPT, so it’s important to put some guard rails in place. I like to call it a trust but verify system. So AI should be used as an assistant, not an autopilot.

And I basically have three points essentially as a simple framework to keep yourself or your teams from blindly trusting AI. And that basically is use AI for ideas, not decisions, fact check everything and remember to keep the human touch. You know, whether it’s copywriting, ad creative or customer interactions, AI should enhance human creativity, not replace it. And for small businesses handling their own marketing, I always recommend pairing AI with continuous learning. You know, instead of letting AI generate your entire strategy, use it as a tool alongside real marketing education and books courses, or even just studying what successful brands are doing.

I’d also suggest learning how to craft better prompts for AI tools like ChatGPT, because that’s where the real magic is, right? It’s it’s in the input, so the more context, instructions, follow up, questions you can provide, the better and more unique the outcome the output becomes. So taking a short course or even watching a few YouTube videos on prompt engineering can make a huge difference in getting AI to generate content that actually feels more original and aligned with your brand.

Erick Espinosa  

That seems to be how most leaders are trying to approach AI across the board, in most industries. Because I think a lot of the issues associated with AI is being conditioned to assume that what the answers that you’re getting are right all the time, so you become very comfortable with using the tool and expect everything it’s telling you is, is okay. You had mentioned to me when we first decided to do this podcast, and what kind of stood out to me was that if you overuse AI, it could be flagged in I think search engines like Google. How does that work exactly?

Usman Amjad 

Yeah, so, I mean, obviously, now that everyone’s generating AI content. You know, it’s the way SEO has traditionally worked, it’s based on keywords, right? So if a page on your website has a bunch of keywords that people are searching for, then you will show up on Google. Now with AI, it’s so easy to just churn out content, right? So it’s almost like spamming Google’s search engine with content that isn’t authentic. And with AI being so prevalent and so many people using it, Google has had to essentially raise the bar in terms of what qualifies as content that can actually rank in search engines. 

As I mentioned before, when, when we last spoke, Google has ways of flagging that content, right? They can detect if something is written by a human, or if it’s written by AI, and they’ve got their own, you know, Google’s a massive company with very, very deep, you know, pockets and access to information. So they know when you’re creating content that’s just filler made by AI versus, you know, something that’s actually written by human and valuable to the search to the user who’s searching. 

Erick Espinosa  

And now Google has its own AI, Gemini. Which I realized they took it out of the search bar because the other day I was trying to use it, and now they’re trying to get me to download an app. I don’t know if you caught that.

Usman Amjad 

I didn’t catch the app. I actually, you know, kind of on that note, Google obviously has experienced quite a dip over the last little while. Actually, I think as of December 2024 searches are down below 90% which is the lowest it’s been in 10 years. So Google is obviously scrambling, because a lot of people are just going to ChatGPT and going to a lot of these other tools to get their information, versus going to search engine and having to check a bunch of links.

And obviously Google has to do some damage control. So its solution to this problem really is, how can we make the search experience better? And they’re doing that by adding its own built in AI like Google Gemini that summarizes, you know, the most pertinent information or answers to people’s questions, and then places it right at the top of the search engine, which goes back to one of my previous points. You talked about optimization for search engines. Now people are optimizing for those AI blurbs that you see at the top, because chances are, if someone sees an answer at the top of the page, that’s what they’re going to click on. And that’s now the big shift as far as SEO is concerned, where people are not just optimizing for searches, but they’re optimizing for Google’s AI, 

Erick Espinosa  

I didn’t even know that was a thing. Obviously, my next question was going to be, you know, as a marketer that specializes in SEO, do you think that AI driven searches are undermining traditional SEO techniques because of the fact that everybody’s using ChatGPT now, Deep Seek and Gemini? And for me, I never thought that. So let me paint the picture here. So when I ask for something in, let’s say, chat GPT, and it pulls it up, and in some cases, it references where it got that material, and then it’ll put the website. Are you saying that now people are like, gunning for that spot rather than being at the top of what a Google search would be. Am I understanding that correctly? 

Usman Amjad 

So it’s a bit of it’s a bit of both, right? People still want the organic ranking. But the drawback, so here’s, it’s kind of a it’s a two sided coin for for Google and, you know, websites, because in order to make sure Google doesn’t lose so much market share to tools like ChatGPT and, you know, Deep Seek, they need to integrate AI into their search engine, right? The only way they can maintain those searches is if people get the same or better experience from Google than they do from ChatGPT. And as a result of that, yeah, I mean, we’re seeing, you know, AI driven tools like ChatGPT and Deep Seek, influencing user behavior, and more people turning to these platforms for information.

And before, the goal was to rank on Google’s first page. Now the real prize is getting your content featured in Google’s AI summary at the top of the list. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone’s actually going to go to your website. So that’s kind of the catch 22 right? If the answer you’re looking for is right at the top, then why are they click on the website and actually go and you know, read the page. There’s still a bit of an issue there, like, yes, you want to optimize for those AI searches at the top, but, you know, that’s, that’s really about the customer experience and making the searchers experience better. But it doesn’t necessarily help the, you know, whoever owns the website, and that’s why it’s a real problem for businesses that rely on traffic, because instead of just chasing clicks, brands have to build real authority, because even if AI summarizes their content, they still want people to remember their name and seek them out later. 

Erick Espinosa  

It’s interesting. It’s kind of like the evolution of the search, but that’s obviously presenting a new set of problems for you guys. I just, I never thought of it in that perspective. Actually, now that I have you here, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about personalization, when it comes to marketing. I feel maybe, in recent years, obviously, personalization is a really big thing, but I feel like it’s maybe been tailored too much to become like borderline creepy. Is AI or the overuse of AI and marketing impacting over personalization at all? Is there a connection there? 

Usman Amjad   

Yeah, so two things, right? One, one is overusing AI. So let’s, let’s talk about that first. Marketers can, and already do overuse AI, and the convenience of the AI generated content means it’s easy to rely on it too much, which leads to generic messaging, repetitive visuals, and then a lack of human connection. You know, the problem isn’t AI itself. It’s when marketers take AI, let AI take over without human oversight. You know, for example, some brands are now fully automating their blog content, emails and social media posts. And at first, this might seem efficient, but if everyone is using the same AI generated tone and structure, that all kind of starts to blur together. We’re already seeing brands getting called out for it. Recently, there’s job postings for AI generated content editors that’s popped up because businesses realize that their AI written blogs weren’t ranking well on Google or engaging real readers. So AI can create, but it can’t think like a human. It lacks that originality, nuance and emotion. And you know, many people have probably experienced this. A perfect example is a customer service chat bot. Many companies rely heavily on AI powered responses, but when customers have complex issues, they get frustrated with those robotic, generic replies, you know.

But on the topic of over personalization, which is kind of when it’s the opposite of what we were just speaking about, it’s like when the ads are so good and so targeted that it’s, you know, as you said, borderline. And you know what? Over Over, personalization, I’ve realized isn’t a battle marketers can win. You know, I’ve been in advertising for almost 10 years. Retargeting ads have existed from the early days of Google and Meta, and people have always found them creepy. Right now, AI is making ads even more precise, so precise that the exact thing someone was just thinking about magically appears in front of them. And of course, they find it creepy. 

Erick Espinosa  

Not just talking about it, you’re thinking about it. That’s just like a whole other level of creepy. 

Usman Amjad 

Totally. And you know, at the end of the day, people don’t actually hate personalized ads. They just don’t like being reminded that they’re being tracked. There’s a psychological effect at play here. You know, we want convenience, but we also want the illusion of privacy, and AI is just making that contradiction more obvious. So does AI impact over personalization? Definitely, the more data AI has, the more aggressive personalization gets. But unless platforms like Google and meta dramatically change how they work, this isn’t going away. You know, the real challenge for marketers is making personalization feel more natural and less intrusive, like suggestions, not surveillance. And that’s the difference between, oh, cool. I needed that. And why is my phone reading my mind

Erick Espinosa

Awesome. Yeah, that’s super good insight. Usman, it was great to have you on Brains Byte Back. If someone is interested in learning more, what is the best way to connect with you? 

Usman Amjad 

The best way to connect with me is probably just reach out to me through LinkedIn. You can type in my name into Google. Uzman Amjad, you should be able to find me and feel free to reach out. Happy to help out. 

Erick Espinosa

Appreciate it. Thank you. And Thank you listeners for joining us and those listening to us from America, this is tax free expertise coming from the great white North. The only thing that we ask for is a like or subscribe. Thanks again for joining us.