AI Content Gone Wrong, and How to Fix It
When AI Content Misses the Mark (And Makes You Cringe)
You’ve seen it. Maybe even posted it. That blog that starts with “In today’s fast-paced digital world…” and ends with a vague call-to-action like “harness the power of AI”. You think it sounds polished.... ok, sure, but it's actually completely soulless.
In recent weeks I was asked to review a newsletter, and the business owner who sent it did so with enormous pride in his proclamation that it was “written entirely by AI”. I was tempted to (but didn't!) reply with "no shit, Sherlock!'" because referring to a dog grooming business as a “pioneering pet wellness haven” kinda was a hint. Close… but no chew toy.
That’s the problem, you see. AI tools are fast, shiny, and impressive, that is until your brand ends up sounding like a LinkedIn post written by a fridge.
In this post, I'm going to share many of the common traps small business owners fall into when using AI for content creation. But, more importantly, I want to give you some tips on how to sidestep them. You’ll walk away with practical fixes, smarter strategies, and hopefully a bit of a laugh at the wild things AI can come up with when left to its own devices.
Let’s kick off, yeah?
Wrong Move #1. No Clear Strategy or Use Case
It's often called the “shiny object syndrome”. That lure of something bright, and flash, and new with bigger than life claims. Yep, AI tools and they're being released by the hundreds each week. Everywhere you look, there's a new AI tool promising faster content, smarter marketing, and fewer headaches. So it’s no surprise small biz owners jump in, hoping to save time or stretch their budget.
But here’s the trap: jumping into AI content creation without a clear strategy is like asking ChatGPT to write your wedding vows, without telling it who you’re marrying.
Without a defined use case, AI content floats around with no real purpose. You might end up with blog posts that sound slick but don’t align with your audience's needs, or social captions that say a lot but mean very little.
A smart AI use case starts with three questions:
Who am I talking to?
What do I want them to think, feel or do?
How does this content serve a business goal (traffic, leads, conversions)?
If you can’t answer those, don’t fire up the chatbot yet. Instead, get clear on your end game, whether it’s creating a consistent blog calendar, improving email open rates, or repurposing your best-performing content. Then, and only then, use AI to help bring that plan to life.
🔧 Fix: Build a content brief first (even a quick one). Then prompt your AI tool with that context, so it supports your direction, not the other way around.
Wrong Move #2. Poor Prompting - Either Vague or Overly Complex
To be honest, most business owners using AI for their content leap into it with a prompt going something like this: “Write a blog post about social media.” That’s like telling a freelancer “just do a bit of marketing stuff”. And your point is?
Here's the deal: Shit in, shit out. Vague inputs lead to vague outputs.
Plot twist: it's often tempting to then go too far the other way, only to end up with the dreaded “prompt soup”, a 4-paragraph monster stuffed with so many instructions the AI short-circuits and spits out something either painfully literal… or just plain weird.
The trick is clarity, not complexity. Good prompts are like good briefs, specific, focused, and with just enough context to guide tone and purpose. Take this instance, below:
💬 Example bad prompt:
“Write an engaging article about AI.”
💡 Better prompt:
“Write a 700-word article for small business owners explaining 3 common mistakes people make using AI content tools. Use a conversational tone and include a practical example for each.”
Notice the difference? The second one gives direction, audience, tone, format, and purpose, all in two straight-forward sentences.
🔧 The Fix: Create and use a mini-template for your prompts. Suggested headings are:
Audience
Format
Tone
Purpose
Key points or outcomes
And, if that sounds all too-hard basket, reach out for some help, because I'm happy to make it simple.
Wrong Move #3. There's No Human-in-the-Loop
Here’s a brutal truth: AI can churn out content in seconds, but left unsupervised, it can also churn out absolute rubbish, or even more concerning, misinformation wrapped in a confident tone.
Small business owners often fall into the trap of trusting the AI’s polish. It sounds convincing. It uses words like “robust” and “synergy” (ick). But, it can also confidently invent stats, misquote experts, and serve up bland advice dressed as brilliance. AI is a predictive language model and, though smart, it tells the user what it it's programing is expected or anticipated given some huuuuuuuuge dataset.
That’s why a “human-in-the-loop” isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s absolutely non-negotiable. Regardless of what you’re creating: a blog, a sales page, or an email campaign, someone with a brain (and preferably some emotional intelligence) needs to review, rework, and reality-check the AI’s work.
And then there’s tone. AI out-of-the-box often defaults to an American, corporate, slightly patronising voice, think “helpful robot from a customer service training video”. If you want your content to sound like you, you need to get in there and reshape it. Add sarcasm. Rewrite phrases. Replace “empower” with something a human would actually say.
Then there's the ethical bit: if your AI content is built from scraped data, hallucinated facts, or outright misleading information... that's a problem. You don’t need to give AI a writing credit, but you do need to check it’s not parroting bad info or nicking someone else's IP.
🔧 Fix: Always do a human edit. Run a fact check. And if you’re outsourcing to AI tools, disclose it where appropriate (especially in industries where trust is currency).
Wrong Move #4. Missing Brand Voice
If your brand voice is what makes you sound like you, then AI, ahhh bless it, is just like the enthusiastic, fresh-faced intern who keeps accidentally slipping into corporate-speak, trying to keep you happy.
Fact is: AI’s default tone is safe, neutral, and wildly forgettable. And that's perfectly fine if you’re writing an FAQ page for a tax calculator. But if you're running a small business where personality, trust, and connection matter, generic AI output just won’t cut it.
Small biz owners often forget to tell AI what their voice actually is. And if you don’t feed it your flavour, it’ll default to sounding like every other chatbot on the block. Suddenly, your quirky brand that usually says “we’re not like the others” now reads like an onboarding email from a SaaS giant in Silicon Valley. And, yep, exactly like the others.
The fix? You have two options:
Train it on your tone by literally pasting in past emails, posts, or content you've written and say, “Talk like this.”
Rewrite everything it gives you so it passes the “could I have said this in real life?” test.
Also: brand voice isn’t just about how something sounds. It’s about what you say, what you don’t, and the turns of phrase that make your audience nod and go, “Yep, that’s them.”
🔧 Fix: Keep a tone-of-voice cheatsheet handy. Include do’s, don’ts, key phrases, humour level, and emotional range. Use it like a filter over everything AI creates.
Wrong Move #5. No Fact-Checking & Obvious Hallucinations
Here’s a fun AI party trick: ask it for a stat, and it’ll give you one—confidently, with made-up percentages and a fake citation to boot. It’s not lying. It’s hallucinating. And unless you double-check, your business might accidentally start spreading fiction dressed as authority.
Small biz owners often don’t realise how easily AI invents stuff. Stats, dates, quotes, even URLs—it’ll whip them up like a bad improv actor trying to bluff their way through a trivia night.
And the worst part? It sounds legit.
AI tools don’t (yet) connect directly to live data unless you’ve plugged them into that capability. So unless your prompt includes accurate info, or you manually check everything after the fact, your blog post might be quoting a study that never existed, or referencing legislation that changed five years ago.
This gets risky fast—especially in industries like finance, health, or law, where misinformation isn’t just embarrassing, it’s legally dicey.
🔧 Fix: Always verify stats and quotes. Use reliable sources (think: gov sites, .edu, known publishers). And if in doubt, cut the data and stick to commentary you can back up. Better still? Provide your own experience-driven insight. Real trumps robotic every time.
asting in past emails, posts, or content you've written and say, “Talk like this.”
Rewrite everything it gives you so it passes the “could I have said this in real life?” test.
Also: brand voice isn’t just about how something sounds. It’s about what you say, what you don’t, and the turns of phrase that make your audience nod and go, “Yep, that’s them.”
Wrong Move #6. Poor Structure, No SEO & Missing CTAs
You can always spot AI content that’s been left to run wild. It rambles. It repeats. It forgets what it was talking about two paragraphs ago. And worst of all, it usually ends without telling the reader what to do next.
Structure matters, especially for SEO. Google isn’t only scanning your keywords; it’s checking whether your content is clear, skimmable, and actually useful. That means solid headings (H2s and H3s), short paragraphs, bullet points, and a logical flow.
And CTAs, the humble but super important call-to-action. AI often forgets to include one altogether. Or it churns out something robotic like “Click here to learn more” at the bottom of every piece. Helpful? Motivational? Not really.
The fix is simple: write your structure first. Use a rough outline with information on your Intro, Key Points, and CTA. Then ask your AI tool to fill in the gaps within that framework. You can even prompt it to write a CTA that suits your goal: “Help me write a CTA that encourages readers to download my lead magnet on AI content tips.” AI needs guidance and direction, in short it needs strategy.
🔧 Fix: Don’t expect AI to structure your content for you. Use SEO tools (or your brain) to map it out first. Always include a relevant, action-driven CTA that tells your reader what to do with the info you just handed them.
Wrong Move #7. No Testing & No Refinement
AI content might be fast, but fast doesn’t always mean effective. If you’re not measuring what’s working, and what’s falling flat, you’re basically taking stabs in the dark dressed up with fancy fonts.
One of the biggest mistakes small biz owners make? Treating content like a set-and-forget activity. They publish an AI-assisted blog post, share the social tile, and… move on.
No data, no test, no clue whether it actually helped their business.
Here’s the kicker they didn't see coming: content is only valuable if it moves the needle. That means tracking:
How many people saw it
What they did next (clicks, time on page, enquiries)
Whether it helped hit business goals (like conversions, signups, or sales)
AI can help with optimisation, too, that's once you’ve got results. Not getting engagement on your email subject lines? Ask AI to suggest five variations. Blog not converting? Feed it the headline and CTA and say, “Make this sharper, more persuasive.”
🔧 Fix: Set one metric per piece of content. Watch it for a month. Then tweak the copy, prompt, or structure, and then test again. AI makes content marketing faster, but only if you’re paying attention to the numbers.
Wrong Move #8. Not Editing The AI-Writing Hallmarks
AI writing has telltale signs, like a poker player whose left eye might twitch every time they bluff. Once you know what to look for, you can spot AI-generated copy a mile away. And if your audience can too? That’s not great for trust.
So what gives something away as being copy and paste AI generated?
Overused phrases like “in today’s fast-paced world…” or “unleash your potential”
Sentence structures that all feel… the same
A lack of specificity—everything is “powerful”, “effective”, “transformational”
Conclusions that fizzle into nothing (“In conclusion, AI is useful. Thanks.”)
Your audience is human. They crave personality, realness, and the occasional weird-but-wonderful anecdote. AI isn’t great at that—yet.
🔧 Fix: Read your draft out loud. If it sounds like a LinkedIn post written by a robot with a communications degree, it probably is. Tweak it for rhythm, swap in your quirks, and add something unexpected. A bit of wit or a real-world story goes a long way towards creating connection.
Conclusion Drawn? Use the Robot, Keep the Human
AI isn’t the villain in your content story, but it’s not the hero either. Used well, it’s a time-saver, a brainstorm buddy, and a very solid first-drafter and idea developer. Used badly, it’s a brand-wrecker that’ll make your business sound like every other one out there.
The good news? You’re now across some of the biggest mistakes small business owners make with AI content, and better still you know how to fix them:
Start with a clear strategy
Give AI smarter prompts
Be the human in the loop
Protect your brand voice
Fact-check everything
Structure your content with purpose
Measure what matters
And watch out for those AI dibber-dobber signs
🔧 Want help applying all this without the overwhelm? Hit me up for a chat. I love working with small business owners on content made easier.
