5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Still Sucks for Marketers

Let me start with this: I’m not some AI-hating, stuck-in-the-past marketer who refuses to embrace the future and the TikTok suggestions by the Gen X intern. AI is cool. I use ChatGPT all the time, or Grok if I'm feeling edgy.

AI is exciting. It has potential. It replaced Google as my default search engine. But, as it stands today, AI also sucks in a lot of ways—especially for marketers.

We keep hearing about how AI is revolutionizing our industry, automating everything, making us all 10 times more productive, and eventually rendering us obsolete. But if you’ve actually tried using AI for real marketing work, you’ve probably hit some frustrating limitations.

So, let’s talk about the five biggest ways AI still sucks for marketers.

1. AI Is Horrible at Long-Form Content

I’ve tried. Oh, have I tried. If you’ve ever attempted to use AI to help edit or refine a 2,000+ word document, you know the pain. At first, it seems helpful—offering a few solid suggestions here and there. But after a few rounds of editing? Suddenly, entire sections vanish into the void, your key points get rearranged into something unrecognizable, and the whole piece starts reading like a grade school essay.

It’s not just rough at editing, either. Ask AI to write a long-form article, and you’ll get a piece that technically makes sense but is completely devoid of personality, insight, or originality. It’s like an overenthusiastic undergrad who read one book on marketing and is now convinced they can write like Seth Godin.

2. AI Writing Is Still Painfully Obvious

Marketers can spot AI-generated content a mile away. How? Let’s count the ways:

• Everything is way too structured. Bullet points and numbered lists are everywhere (ironic, given this article's format, but hey this is a listicle). And AI loves em dashes—the longer dashes, like the one I just used, and AI never uses spaces before or after them.
• Clichés galore. "In today's fast-paced digital landscape..." "Content is king!" Stop. Just stop. In the wrong context, or really in any context, clichés in writing don't make text sound more human.
• The tone is off. It’s either robotic, overly formal, or weirdly enthusiastic about mundane things. Sure you can improve your prompting skills, but prompts can only help so much.
• And for social media? AI loves throwing in 🚀 emojis where they don’t belong. No, I don’t need a 😂 at the end of a B2B SaaS post, thanks.

Yes, AI-generated text is getting better, but the uncanny valley is real. You can polish it up, tweak the wording, and make it feel almost human, but it still takes considerable work.

3. AI Still Needs So Much Human Oversight

The promise was that AI would take things off our plates, not add extra layers of babysitting. But here we are, painstakingly tweaking AI-generated captions, fixing automated email sequences, and rewriting chatbot scripts so they don’t sound like they were written by an alien who just discovered the English language.

Even automation, which should be AI’s strong suit, still requires an insane amount of setup. Want AI to write and schedule blog posts automatically? Integrate tools? Set up seamless workflows? Unless you’re a developer or enjoy spending hours troubleshooting Zapier connections, you’re still doing most of this manually. And fun fact, we have no AI-automation here at CMO Corner.

Sure, ChatGPT Operator will likely be a game-changer when it’s fully rolled out and all the kinks are fixed. But today? The average marketer still can’t just tell AI to “automate my marketing” and expect it to work without a ton of oversight.

4. AI Fails at Originality (and It’s Getting Worse)

The more AI content floods the internet, the worse AI’s outputs become. It’s a digital snake eating its own tail. AI scrapes existing content, rearranges it, and spits it back out in slightly different words. But because so many people are using AI to generate new content, the internet is now filled with regurgitated AI junk—and AI is learning from that junk. It’s an endless loop of mediocrity.

This means AI-generated content isn’t just unoriginal—it’s becoming actively worse. If everyone leans on AI for content creation, we’re going to be drowning in a sea of bland, soulless content that all sounds the same. If your marketing relies on differentiation (spoiler: it does), AI isn’t going to help you stand out.

5. AI Is Great at Making Marketers Think They Suck

AI tools spit out content in seconds, making us mere humans feel like slow, inefficient relics. But here’s the thing: fast doesn’t mean good. AI can churn out endless amounts of passable-but-bland content, but marketers bring the strategy, creativity, nuance, context, and gut instinct that actually make marketing work.

If you’ve ever compared your own writing to an AI-generated version and thought, "Wow, this thing is faster than me," well, yes it undeniably is. But take a step back. AI is a tool, not a replacement. Your insight, your creative angles, your ability to connect with an audience—those are the things that matter. AI doesn’t understand your audience’s emotions, struggles, or desires. It doesn’t build relationships. It doesn’t tell compelling stories. You do.

The Bottom Line

AI is impressive, and it’s only going to get better. But right now? It still generally sucks for marketers. It’s a great assistant, but a terrible replacement. The hype may make it sound like AI is here to do all our jobs for us, but the reality is that marketers still need to bring the strategy, creativity, and human touch that AI (at least with its current context limits) just can’t replicate.

So, while AI is a fun tool to have in the toolkit, don’t fall for the illusion that it’s a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Because if you let AI do all your marketing work for you, well… good luck standing out.