AI Can Damage Your Business - Here’s How to Use it Right
I launched right around the same time as Chat-GPT, so I’ve been fielding the same question since I started writing: why can’t I get to AI do it?
My feelings about AI are obviously biased, so in this post, I’ll do my best to explain the objective facts. When you’re done reading, I hope you’ll understand how LLMs like Chat-GPT actually work, how businesses use them badly, and how you can use them well to support your work without causing problems down the line.
How LLMs (like Chat-GPT) Work
LLM stands for Large Language Model. An LLM is a kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that deals with huge sets of data and text input and output. Chat-GPT is an LLM, and LLMs are a kind of AI, but for ease of understanding I’ll use these terms interchangeably.
Even though they’re called Artificial Intelligence, LLMs aren’t actually doing any real thinking - hence “artificial”. LLMs like Chat-GPT are actually looking at their huge sets of data and analysing which words in which order are the most likely answer to your query.
This has a few important implications for people who write for business:
Chat-GPT can’t come up with anything new and interesting. By design, it is repeating what already exists.
When something is widely misunderstood, Chat-GPT will also misunderstand it. You cannot be certain it’s presenting facts unless you ask it for reliable sources and verify them yourself.
Content written by Chat-GPT usually follows the same general structure, because it’s using the most probable pattern. This makes it really easy to spot for both Google and potential customers (which we’ll get into next).
I won’t go too deep into social and environmental concerns in this post, but it’s also worth keeping in mind that because LLMs use such huge amounts of data, the data centres they need to sustain them take massive amounts of water to control the temperature.
Some AI companies have built or planned to build data centres in locations that are close to residential towns and/or already struggling with drought, placing excessive demand on the water system and causing locals’ taps to dry up.
I bring this up not to debate the morality of AI’s impact so far, but so that our decisions to use it or not can be more informed.
What Happens When Businesses Use AI Wrong…
Straight up publishing AI generated content is tempting, I know, but it costs your business in the long run.
AI Damages Consumer Trust
A 2025 survey of 1,000 American consumers found that 82.1% of us reckon we can spot AI content, going up to 88.4% for the 22-30 age group, and 40.4% of people would think less highly of a brand who used AI content. That’s a huge chunk of your potential audience.
Google Deprioritizes Low Quality Content
Even if your customers aren’t AI-savvy, Google is - and getting on the first page of Google can make a huge difference to your business.
Google prioritizes content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. This doesn’t automatically rule out AI-generated content, but it does make it more difficult for AI content to rank highly: you are the experience, the expert, the authority, and the source of trust in your business.
For now, Google doesn’t punish content just because it’s AI, but it does recommend clarity on AI use for your readers.
…And How You Can Use it Right
Personally, I prefer not to use AI at all - but that doesn’t mean I can’t see why someone would. It’s easy, it saves time, and it’s free (for now). But when something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
Using your business’ own brand voice is the best way forward, and if you’re still set on using Chat-GPT, there are ways to do it without betraying your audience and risking your Google rankings.
I can’t be inside your brain, so I can’t tell you the right way to use Chat-GPT for you. That said, I would suggest using it mainly for research, organization, and feedback. For example, you might ask it to help you find sources on a certain topic (that you can then read and validate yourself), organize your article idea into a loose template, and help you identify edits when you’re done.
These are all important skills that you can develop with practice, and I would encourage readers to future-proof their skillset by learning to write your own content. But, in the meantime, I hope these tips give you a good idea of how to use AI the right way.
