It’s 2026, and everyone keeps jumping on the AI hype train, but to me, this whole AI thing looks like a giant scam that has been pushed onto the public through taxpayer dollars (these AI companies rely on government subsidies and other questionable funds).
Whenever you’re suspicious about some trend that is happening, follow the money. But instead of getting into conspiracy talk, I’ll focus strictly on the facts.
Everyone using AI to do their businesses tasks…
Everyone’s work is passing through the same few layers (chatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, whatever)
The output is generic, dull, full of cliche sentence structure, stuff that sounds bland AF and when a potential customer reads it, they go running away because they now know you’re cheap, generic, and the same as everyone else
The Race to the Bottom and Why AI is Killing People’s Businesses:
AI is a race to the bottom for everyone who decides to get involved with it and use it to do the actual work.
Let’s say you’re a company who does marketing for businesses, and you use AI to cut costs and try to maximize profits. Well guess what, your clients are going to do that to you as well. They’re going to want those savings to pass onto them, and then they’re going to expect your services to become much cheaper, or they’ll try to cut you out entirely and then try to do it in-house using cheap AI tools.
And what happens when the client’s clients realize they can cut costs as well? Well, this whole thing has an upstream effect through every point where the money flows. It leads to catastrophic results for everyone, and that’s why the economy looks the way it does right now in 2026.
If you don’t believe me, go and check r/facebookads subreddit. Since 2020-ish, everyone on there has been complaining about how they hate the AI features Facebook keeps auto-enabling whenever someone launches campaigns. The advertiser ends up wasting a bunch of time having to disable all that junk to get campaigns to work even remotely well.
Big tech has jumped off a cliff and no one notices what’s actually going on, but I do.
The moral of the story is that AI needs to be avoided or at least severely limited in use if you don’t want to participate in this race to the bottom. Those who decide to keep doing what they’ve always done, take the time and effort to write unique, authentic, remarkable content from their own hands, design things with their own hands will see increasing returns, because the demand for these people will increase as people realize they’ve been fooled.
Another problem with AI that no one is talking about right now is that people started using AI for everything, even for thinking. You have to selectively use it. There’s certain things to use it for… content is not it, customer facing text is not it, customer communication is not it (your customers don’t like it).
You know? There’s a funny thing I observed about people who use AI in their businesses. They think it’s helping them make things “efficient” and “better quality” but then when they go see ads or posts from people trying to pitch them on services using AI generated content, their eyes glaze over, they yawn, and just quietly zone out and ignore the message. NEWSFLASH. Your customers are doing the same thing to you.
Here are a few actual uses for AI (but even these might end up in disaster, who knows):
Use it in backend processes, automation, coding, reading large amounts of data quickly and finding trends.
What to watch out for:
Even in certain cases like coding, when a potential customer sees a generic UI/UX interface, their eyes glaze over and they yawn and move on. People don’t want to see your perfectly coded cut and paste app you generated on some vibecode app after 30 minutes. And they can tell when it’s been designed and coded by an AI.
The market rewards effort and skill, even if that comes with human imperfections. When your offer is something that was created in 2 seconds with a prompt, no one cares.
All these random people building sales agent AIs and all this stuff are going to find the painful way that people (the ones with the money) don’t want to be sold to by AI and if they figure it out, they’ll dip. AI Sales agents aren’t going to replace closers who can sell a high ticket offer in a way a human can, AI marketing agents aren’t going to replace a marketing agency, and so on.
Its a silly gold rush just like back in 2016 we had the clickfunnels and Russell Brunson squad trying to sell you the easy way to success by copying someone’s funnel. And everyone and their mom starting Facebook ad agencies 2016 – 2018. In 2020 they were getting everyone hyped up on altcoins and cryptos. These people selling you AI services are riding trends, not trying to solve problems. After this fades, they’ll move on to the next big thing (whatever is trending next). And you’ll be left holding a big bill for AI services that didn’t make a dent in your business, and in fact, hurt your business over the long term.
If you want authentic marketing that uses a human based approach, and avoids using AI for the most part, we specialize in that.
Zero Slop Marketing is helping small business owners build a non-AI inbound marketing system for their business:
