How to Ruin Your Brand with Generative AI

Explained Here Using High School Movie Tropes

Let’s view the business world, for a moment, through the lens of an 80s teen movie: in most industries, there are jocks and there are nerds. In finance, the jocks are managing directors, the dealmakers. In healthcare, they’re highly trained and specialized doctors. In tech, it’s the managers of a big product. You get the picture.

Usually, the nerds in these industries – getting shoved into lockers, having their lunch trays flipped onto their sweater vests, handing out yellow flyers for the D&D club – work in marketing. I know, I’m one.

For years, the nerds had one thing going for them: they created content for the jocks. But generative AI has flipped that dynamic on its head. If jocks can produce LinkedIn-ready content on their own with a few keystrokes, whither the lowly nerd?

AI Has Put Marketing on the Chopping Block

This isn’t just weird 2026 corporate fanfic. Marketing colleagues across multiple industries are reporting plans to move content production up the food chain. In some cases, the jocks have a specially trained LLM, while in others, they’re using ChatGPT or another widely available platform. It’s a trend in keeping with a recent survey, by executive search firm Spencer Stuart, that found 36 percent of CMOs expected to reduce headcount over the coming 12-24 months by “utilizing AI or eliminating redundancies.”

It’s a move that makes some sense. Giving skilled professionals or senior leaders the tools to create content without a big time commitment saves the effort of having to explain themselves to writers. It also cuts down on the bureaucratic process of editorial production and, um, the need to employ nerds.

But it runs the risk of hurting the brand for two reasons, one machine, one human.

The Limits of the Machine Voice and Perspective

First, the machines: Generative AI content isn’t bad, per se. It’s just kind of all the same. The feigned nuance (“it’s not just this, it’s that”), the Big Reveals set off by colons, the mini-lists, it’s become the recognizable voice of what the kids call a Clanker. What does it mean if everything you write reads, “Here’s the thing: this isn’t change — it’s transformation”? People will actually revolt against your work and publicly mock you for indulging in “slop.” This is a legitimate reputational threat to public figures and brands.

Also, machines have a perspective that shapes the content in subtle ways, mainly from the sources it draws on and those it omits. The perspective changes depending on the inputs. It’s visible in the way commercial LLMs like ChatGPT rely on Wikipedia, while others, like Grok, draw more heavily on content from X (formerly Twitter). What does it mean if your LLM is pulling from a narrow set of sources? It might mean that an important piece of evidence in The New York Times or a research paper gets omitted. And in its place, the model plugs in bad info from a low-quality-but-easily-accessible blog.

AI Is Not A Competitive Advantage for Marketing

Let’s turn to the human side. Senior level people are usually pretty smart. Often, they’re too smart. A doctor, for example, might have trouble explaining a condition in plain language, or not understand why they need to. Or they struggle with more ethereal marketing concepts like brand voice or audience fatigue around an issue. These are challenges that experts or senior people can shrug off, but have a long-tail effect on the brand.

The danger to brands from AI is that, to paraphrase Nicholas Carr, it is not a competitive advantage in marketing. It removes all the sweat, the consideration and even the weirdness from a brand, all things a marketing employee might value, in service of speed and efficiency. Perhaps that’s why the AI consulting firm Section found employees’ excitement about AI tends to increase the more senior they are.

Perhaps it’s the creeping feeling of obsolescence that makes frontline white collar workers less enthusiastic about AI. But maybe it’s the everyday experience with how undercooked a lot of platforms are today and how undifferentiated the output is. Hold onto these people, don’t bypass them in the name of efficiency.