On a recent visit to the Midwest, I caught up with a few friends.
One friend shared that her husband was recently hired as an engineer for data centers. She admits to some uncertainty about the future of AI and humanity, but is content that their family’s financial well-being is assured.
Another friend is a Creative Director at Target. He explained to me that Target heavily restricts the use of AI in creative projects for fear of public backlash.
Another is using AI to code an app that will help small hotels afford solutions to better serve their guests. As we chatted over dinner, he mentioned “it’s coding the app right now, while we eat”.
Another friend owned a Subaru with a bumper sticker of Calvin (from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes) urinating on a data center.
During my visit to middle America, and throughout this year, one thing has become increasingly clear: people have a lot of feelings about AI.
I sensed a generalized curiosity (sometimes fascination), but also cautious distrust (sometimes resolute opposition) to all things artificial intelligence.
Many people didn’t want to discuss the topic at all. Merely hearing its mention among conversation could make some bristle.
A Year of Studying AI
But in a professional setting, so many of us act like AI is the first thing we want to talk about. To ‘stay ahead of the curve’. Every professional database is packed with information about how we’d be foolish not to use it in the day-to-day aspect of our jobs.
For the past few years, my industry has been shoved into AI. Every aspect of my job – from testing ad creatives and making social media content to optimizing content for search and analyzing data – has been AI-ified.
A nagging fear of being left behind, and the understanding that anyone who claims to be a ‘digital marketing expert’ should be at the forefront of this space, drove me ever-deeper into studying AI.
I read books. I installed beta software. I attended webinars. And I experimented hungrily with AI in my work.
But my experiences experimenting with AI the past few years have brought me to a different conclusion than “wow, where has this BEEN all my life?!” Or “how could we ever live without AI in marketing going forward?!”
The AI Content Saturation Crisis
The speed and unrestricted nature of AI led to mass adoption, and therefore, mass output. All of this unchecked content production created a saturation crisis.
It’s no longer resourceful to compile information from various articles that already exist online and present them in a new light and from a new perspective. It’s no longer impressive for a product to be displayed in an image with dewy drops of water in perfect lighting.
We’ve all seen the tell-tale signs of AI in writing: em dashes, grouping ideas in triplets, formulaic transitions (“it’s not this, it’s that”), and cliché business summaries (“At X company, we believe…”).
We’ve all seen photos and videos on social media that at first glance appear works of art, bubbles and shining shells and stunning human faces in front of otherworldly backdrops, only to realize they were generated by AI. A strange shadow, an eerie perfection, a hand with 6 fingers… it’s just not quite what our real world is.
Google, social media and other search engines are now asking for authenticity and originality above all else. The hope is that prioritizing lived experience, proprietary data and fresh, human insights will help cleanse the mess of AI Slop we’ve all created.
Positive Impact for Business At the Expense of Humanity
There are still certain tasks that undeniably have a net-positive impact for business, with little downside or public repercussion.
Whether creating an app or editing a website, coding has never been easier with the help of AI. Google Ads “AI Advisor” helps answer complex questions, like breaking down multi-faceted performance issues. Shopify AI can rapidly analyze POS, website and wholesale product sale data to develop strategic plans for restocks and pricing.
But in many of these instances, those tasks were done by humans in the past. Many of those human jobs are at risk.
As of mid-2026, artificial intelligence was explicitly cited in 87,714 US job cuts during the first five months of the year alone, according to layoff tracking data highlighted by CNBC. The Walt Disney Company laid off roughly 1,000 employees in April 2026, citing the need for a more “agile and technologically-enabled workforce”.
And where jobs were not lost, work may have been stolen. As of March 2026, Harvard Magazine reported that more than 70 copyright infringement cases are currently caught up in US courts against AI tech companies.
And then there’s the tiny factor of our global environment. Data centers contribute to pumping water out of ancient underground aquifers faster than they can be refilled, competing with local residents for access to freshwater. Plus noise pollution, fossil fuel demands and more.
I – like many Americans – sit here and wonder, is it all worth it?
Forced Micro-Steps Toward Containment
Many say this train has already left the station. In Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave, he explains many horrifying ways that AI could go wrong (especially in tandem with biotechnology). But he explains that it is immensely difficult to keep powerful general purpose technologies under human control (what he refers to as “containment”).
Most recently the EU has forced all of us in mass communications to pump the breaks with its own version of global containment. The European Union’s enforcement of Article 50 under the EU AI Act officially took effect on August 2, 2026, requiring global tech companies and platforms to visibly label and digitally watermark AI-generated text and images or face major fines of up to €15 million or 3% of their global annual revenue.
It has been a necessary time for contemplation and pause.
How I’m Adjusting My Clients’ SEO and Ad Strategies for 2027
As I’ve reflected on the past year’s experiments with AI, my own research, and my trip back to the Midwest, I’ve made some decisions on how I will adjust my client’s strategies, as they relate to AI, for 2027:
- SEO strategy
- In 2026, I focused on making my clients’ existing and new content more digestible for robots (robots.txt, schema markup, listicles, FAQs, etc.)
- In 2027, I’ll be focusing on my clients’ human insights instead (especially in heavily content saturated industries like tourism)
- I plan to use my journalistic training to interview my clients to gather more personal experience to inform their content
- The challenge becomes how we tie in their personal experiences and human insights into what people are searching for or what people care about
- I’ll also be performing regular “Sanity Checks” to prompt AI Answers for comparisons about my clients vs their competitors. If the response yields insights on how my client can better compete, I will recommend these changes.
- In fields that are not yet oversaturated (such as local architecture), traditional SEO strategies will still perform.
- Ads
- I will continue using Google Ads’ AI-driven campaigns, such as Performance Max and Demand Gen, where AI helps inform which creatives perform best and on which channels, based on the setup goals.
- I will NOT use AI for Meta Ads. I tried it briefly this year and was unsurprised that AI features did not assist in ad performance. I still feel these features have a long way to go and markedly perform worse. I will be toggling off!
- I went back and forth on ChatGPT for a while. But in ads, any widely used, low competition space is worth pursuing. I am in the process of starting up a ChatGPT campaign for one of my clients now and look forward to reviewing its performance.
- Content & Idea Generation
- I remain incredibly cautious when using it for image generation or utilizing generative features for editing. I screenshot to avoid digital watermarks. I do this sparingly and only as a last resort.
- I am working to ween myself off of AI generation for writing. I have been writing professionally for most of my life. I use AI now mostly only for writing social media captions, where the sheer volume dictates that less time be spent, as well as ads, where AI can shift through creative variations more efficiently than any human ever could. I will allow sufficient time for human text generation for web pages and blogs.
- I always sit alone with a note pad and no technology while I am brainstorming any creative content: ad campaigns, social ideas, etc. While AI can help with writer’s block, I still feel that a blank slate and a free-flowing pencil are the best tools we have to come up with truly unique and human ideas.
AI vs. Human Content
I chose to write this article with my own two human hands, keyboard finger-strike by keyboard finger-strike, without so much as a query of AI support.
Could I have done something more useful with the 4 hours I spent writing this? Will my human-written article perform even better than the one I could have swiftly produced from a bullet-point outline with the help of ChatGPT?
This blog is a bit rambling. Maybe not my best work. But it’s mine. It’s human.
And despite every development, every new tool, every financial assurance, and every feeling we’ve all had about AI this year, it seems that we all still crave proof of humanity in the world.
