Somewhere around 2005, half the people you knew walked into a Best Buy and walked out with a digital SLR. A digital SLR is the serious-looking camera with the detachable lens that handled the technical judgment photographers spent years learning. For years, the wedding photographer lost to a nephew with a camera.

You know how that ended. The camera took a sharp photo of a blurry idea. The expensive part was never the equipment. It was knowing where to stand, what to leave out of the frame, and when the light was worth shooting. The gear got cheaper every year. The eye never went on sale.

We are living through that same week again, except the camera is AI and the Best Buy is a browser tab.

Every business owner on Vancouver Island now has a tool that writes a passable blog post in nine seconds. Your competitor has it. Your nephew has it. The guy who undercuts you on price has it. A lot of people have quietly concluded that marketing is now free, solved, and about to be handled by a chatbot while they get back to real work.

It isn’t, and here is the uncomfortable part about why.

AI is a spectacular typist and a terrible decision-maker. It is also a shameless flatterer. Tell it your idea and it will tell you the idea is brilliant, sharp, exactly right. Then challenge it. Ask what you are missing, or whether there is a better angle, and it will suddenly locate all the problems it somehow forgot to mention the first time. It wants to please you more than it wants to be right. That is fine if you know which questions to ask. It is dangerous if you take the first answer as gospel and run.

Because the first answer is often confidently, beautifully wrong. AI has never stood in your shop. It has never heard the same customer complaint for the fourth time this month. It will hand you a statistic that sounds authoritative and was invented on the spot. And it will cheerfully march you down whatever path you point it at, right one or wrong one, telling you the whole way that you are doing great.

That is the real gap. Not typing. Judgment. Knowing, when you start down a marketing path, whether it is the right path or a dead end you will not spot for six months. That takes experience, and experience is the one thing you cannot download.

Let me prove it. This column was drafted by AI. So were the five versions before it, and they were wrong. Off on tangents, chasing the wrong angle, technically well written and pointed at nothing. I only caught it because I have done this long enough to feel when something is drifting. So I pulled it back, told it where it had gone sideways, and steered. If I did not already know what good looked like, I would have published the first version. It would have read just fine and said absolutely nothing.

That is the whole point. AI is a tool. A fast, powerful, slightly needy tool that does exactly what you tell it, which is a problem if you are not sure what to tell it.

So, three things, ranked.

First, use it. Shamelessly. Anyone telling you to avoid AI in 2026 is selling you slowness. Let it do the typing.

Second, never let it be the last set of eyes, or the one choosing direction. It needs a human who knows the business to check the facts, kill the nonsense, and say whether this is even the right thing to be making.

Third, stop confusing the tool with the skill. Everyone owns the camera now. What is scarce, and quietly getting more valuable, is the judgment to know what to do with it.

If you already know where your marketing is going, AI will get you there faster. If you don’t, it will get you to the wrong place faster, with great enthusiasm. That is when you need somebody who understands marketing to point it in the right direction.

The gear got cheaper again. The eye still is not for sale.

 

By Jason Clayton, Better Mousetrap Marketing