SPINMANTV.ME

Okay so I gotta write this one down because I called it and I want the receipts.

There’s a piece out of Inc right now, written by Emily Cody, and it’s all about how “No AI” is becoming the new “all natural.” Brands like Aerie, Equinox, Almond Breeze, they’re all starting to lean into “we didn’t use AI to make this” as an actual selling point. And the story that kicks the whole thing off is wild, someone screenshotted a line of copy off Nike’s product page, about Jannik Sinner of all people, and the caption was basically “they let a GPT-ism through on the main Nike page?? I thought marketing teams caught this stuff by now.” And it had that cadence, you know the one, that slightly hollow, slightly too-smooth rhythm that anyone who’s spent any real time prompting a chatbot will recognise instantly.

And that’s the whole thing right there. That’s what I’ve been saying for a while now.

People can feel it. They might not be able to articulate exactly what’s off, but they know when they’re being talked at by a machine instead of talked to by a person. And the second they clock it, the trust just evaporates. Doesn’t matter how good the product is or how tight the media plan was, because at the end of the day people don’t want to feel like they’re being sold to by something that’s never actually cared about anything in its life. And so what happens is the backlash isn’t quiet. It’s public, it’s screenshotted, it goes around, and now it’s a headline in a national business publication.

I mean this is the exact thing I’ve been telling people. Marketing leaders got real excited real fast about the idea that AI could just do the work of actual human beings, cut the headcount, scale the output, hit the content calendar every single day without ever running out of ideas or getting tired. And for a minute there it looked like a free lunch. But you can’t shortcut the thing that actually makes people care, which is a real point of view from a real person who read the thing, thought about the thing, and decided it mattered enough to say something about it.

So now you’ve got brands scrambling to walk it back, and the funny part is they’re doing it the same way food brands did with “all natural” twenty years ago. It becomes the label. It becomes the badge. “No AI here” starts showing up in campaigns the same way “no artificial flavours” used to. And that’s kind of the tell, right, because you don’t need a badge for something people already trust by default. You need the badge because the default broke.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to though, because I don’t think the answer is brands ditching AI entirely and going full luddite either. That’s not it. The winners aren’t gonna be the brands that reject the tools, they’re gonna be the ones that use AI to clear out all the busywork so the humans on the team have more room to actually develop a point of view, take a real creative risk, understand who they’re talking to. AI can absolutely handle the grind. What it can’t do is have taste. It can’t tell you what’s actually worth saying versus what’s just filling a content calendar. That’s still a human job, and I think the brands that figure that out first are gonna be the ones that come out the other side of this looking smart instead of scrambling.

Anyway. Called it. And I don’t think this is the last time either, because I think we’re gonna see a lot more of this over the next year as companies realise the AI-does-everything pitch has a real cost attached to it that nobody priced in.