It Is Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing – Just Ask AI About Content Diarrhoea…

Marketing Unfiltered 88 → Before You Buy Another AI Tool, Read This About Everyone's Content Diarrhoea

Happy Friday Friends, all set for H2?
Or are you counting down to your summer break?

This week we have Harry delivering wise words on AI and its first to third order effects on Marketing.

A personal thank you for your feedback and replies on last weeks 6 trends for H2. The move to full funnel seemed to kick the hornets nest…

Now, onto

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It Is Possible To Have Too Much Of A Good Thing – Just Ask AI About ‘Doc Diarrhoea’…

By Harry Lang, Launching The Oxford AI School Next Week, Connect On LinkedIn

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When a constant raft of low cost AI tools meets incrementally more simple usability, everyone can work bigger better smarter and faster. Twinned with a global power race, and we’ve got a problem…

Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing catch up. A new job in a new industry with new channels and new people. At the same time, new AI tools were arriving like a slurry of overexcited hubris, promoted in the media, by influencers and over Slack channels every single day.

One week Lovable was the big ‘I AM’, the next Clawbot was everyone’s best mate. Somewhere underneath, Claude started to lay the foundations to eventually become the daily driver of record.

Everyone’s got a take on AI. The tech bros say it’ll 10x your business. The naysayers say it’ll take your job, fry the planet, and hallucinate its way through your token budget in hours. Meanwhile the consultants are charging telephone numbers to tell you that you must have an AI strategy (preferably theirs) before you go obsolete.

While there are a gazillion upsides to all this frenetic, competitive land grabbing, nothing this universally adopted comes for free. The Tokens paying for the earth-warming server farms are subsidised to the hilt, loss-leading in the finite style of Icarus, except instead of flying closer to the sun, the server cities are bringing the sun to us, scoffing Greenhouse gas exuding fossil fuels at the same pace a Scottish football fan chugs Budweiser.

It’s not the App building, vibe coding, deck doctoring utopia the LLM turbo-bros would have you believe, so I thought it would be worth doing a teeny tiny reality check to look at the potential downsides next to the amply promoted upsides before we all float away on the hype bubble (or drown under rising sea levels).

The Value/Cost of AI Adoption

The real question is what this stratospheric innovation will actually cost you/ us/ our kids, and whether the people pushing you to adopt it faster have factored any of that in (TL;DR they haven’t).

Looking For Goldilocks

So where the hell Is the sweet spot?

If you don’t have the budget to deploy AI well, then you definitely don’t have the budget to do it badly. The ‘not too hot/ not too cold’ line is extremely thin, so pick two or three tools that solve specific problems in your workflow then measure actual output quality, not just speed. Don’t let subscription creep turn ‘AI efficiency’ into a new leaky bucket cost centre that nobody’s managing.

The 2035 Scorecard

If current trajectories hold, this is where we’ll probably end up:-

• Productivity gains: Real, measurable, and likely to plateau once the tools mature and adoption equalises

• Cost savings: Real for large companies, but mixed for SMEs once true implementation costs kick in

• Misinformation risk: AI output volume is scaling faster than human verification can ever hope to. And don’t get me started on agentic mediation…

• Brand differentiation: The brands that survive will go balls deep into what AI can’t do.

• Regulatory pressure: The compliance cost of AI misuse is so far down most priority lists as to be entirely irrelevant. THAT WILL CHANGE.

• Environmental damage: Well, if you’re comfortable kissing goodbye to Southampton, Dublin, Cardiff, Bristol, Peterborough, Hull and chunks of London, then there’s absolutely nothing to worry about

AI amplifies whatever you point it at then tells you you’re doing an awesome job. If there’s one thing us human beings share is that we bloody LOVE a compliment, so be enthusiastic, sure, but it’s time to be a little cynical, too, and stop believing all the shit we get served in exchange for a poorly executed prompt.

Which brings us neatly on to one of the most common (but least acknowledged) downsides of the AI era:- ‘Doc Diarrhoea’.

With everything becoming so bloody easy and efficient, I’ve seen a massive increase in this phenomena. Every day, and after every meeting, people scamper off with their Gemini,. Firefly or Granola notes and start ‘being productive’. New GTM drafts, research papers, campaign ideas, customer analysis, White Papers are sharted out like confetti at a wedding. We’re all generating far too much for the sake of production and a clear instance of ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’.

In my last role, I hit a staggering thirty eight hours of meetings one week, and it rarely dipped below thirty. Every day, my team and others would share such docs, spat out by Claude and their agents.

Nobody ever read them.
Nobody had the time.

In a world where AI is meant to make us more efficient and productive, Doc Diarrhoea is doing the exact opposite, so IMHO there’s a serious need for tighter RACI processes and protocols to pivot this wasteful enthusiasm in more positive and productive directions.

It might seem a bit weird that a guy on the cusp of launching an AI training school for local SMEs is being such a Debbie Downer, but I’m firmly of the view that honesty is the best way for us to escape the hype bubble faster.

We need to craft a pragmatic, world friendly version of ‘The Age Of AI’, to mitigate Doc Diarrhoea and to progress in a more holistic, less power hungry, greed-fuelled, ‘profit at any cost’ way. To achieve that, we need to collectively work towards a more sustainable, positive, people friendly way of harnessing this incrementally powerful tech (especially before Gen AI kicks in…).

The next ten years will sort businesses into two groups: those that use AI to do more of the same at lower cost, and those that use it to do something better. The first group will compete in a race to the bottom while the second will make themselves harder to replicate whilst benefiting humanity and the planet.

You need to decide which group you’d rather be in, and you need to do it soon.

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As a reminder, Harry is launching The Oxford AI School next week to help as many SME professionals as possible learn to use AI well, in a way that's practical, fun, easy and sustainable.
Please connect with Harry on LinkedIn and please follow the school’s socials here.

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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend