Andy Richards is founder and creative director at Polygrafic
The content treadmill isn’t slowing down—and if you lead a brand, you feel it every day. The pressure to produce, scale, and adapt at speed is relentless. Enter AI-generated content: tools that promise to write your blog posts, email campaigns, ads, and even your brand voice itself. The tech is fast, cheap, and—on the surface—good enough.
But here’s the deeper question: If everyone’s using the same tools to generate content, how do you maintain anything resembling brand authenticity? At what point does scale start to chip away at what made your brand distinct in the first place?
This isn’t just a question of copywriting—it’s a strategic issue. The intersection of AI and branding is no longer theoretical. It’s operational, and it’s happening now.
Speed, scale, and seamless consistency
AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai offer an obvious upside: speed and scalability. What used to take a team of writers a week can now be spun up in an afternoon. For startups and lean teams especially, this is transformational. It means faster campaign rollouts, more testing, broader reach, and sharper ROI on content budgets.
Even for mature brands, AI delivers utility. Global teams can generate localized versions of content with aligned tone and messaging. Customer support bots are learning to mirror brand language. Product descriptions get written in bulk, and newsletters stay on schedule.
That’s the upside. But as with any shortcut, it comes with trade-offs.
Keeping pace without losing your voice
Brand voice used to be sacred—something carefully cultivated over time. But when you’re feeding a dozen content channels, daily, AI starts to look like a lifeline.
The problem? When too many brands use the same generative tools without strong brand inputs, the outputs start to sound eerily similar. It’s not that the content is bad. It’s just forgettable.
We’re seeing a wave of what I’d call algorithmic sameness—content that technically “works” but lacks any real brand signature. And the truth is, most consumers can’t articulate it, but they can feel when a brand voice is diluted. When the story has no soul.
Losing the human element that builds real trust
Here’s where things get slippery. AI can write fast, but it doesn’t feel. It can mimic empathy, but it doesn’t understand context. It can remix your tone, but it won’t instinctively know when to break it.
The heart of brand trust—emotional nuance, humor, humility, cultural relevance—comes from human judgment. That’s especially critical when you’re navigating sensitive topics, launching something bold, or engaging communities who demand more than polish.
There have already been high-profile brand missteps where AI-generated content missed the mark, misread the moment, or simply sounded tone-deaf. In each case, the brand’s credibility took a hit. Because people don’t connect with “efficient”—they connect with real.
Human-AI collaboration as creative leverage
This doesn’t mean AI has no place in your brand stack. On the contrary—it’s already indispensable. The smart play isn’t to reject it; it’s to integrate it with intention.
Think of AI as your creative co-pilot, not your creative director. Use it for ideation, for drafting, for generating volume—but always layer in human oversight where it matters: voice, tone, nuance, emotion.
Some of the most effective teams right now use AI to generate structured first drafts, then hand off to strategists, editors, and creatives who shape the output through a brand lens. That hybrid workflow is becoming a real differentiator—brands that do it well aren’t just faster, they’re sharper.
Guardrails, governance, and strategic control
The leap from human-led to AI-assisted content isn’t just a workflow change—it’s a governance issue. Without strong brand guidelines adapted for AI, you risk inconsistency at best, and reputational harm at worst.
This is where marketing leadership needs to lead:
- Codify your brand voice in a way that machines can interpret.
- Build review layers for tone, context, and factual accuracy.
- Decide where AI can act independently and where human input is non-negotiable.
- Establish rules around disclosure—will your audience know when content is AI-assisted?
AI can hallucinate, fabricate, or unintentionally offend. You can’t eliminate that risk—but you can manage it through smart process and clear standards.
Authenticity is still the ultimate brand advantage
At a glance, AI-generated content solves a production problem. But at a deeper level, it challenges the core of brand identity: What does your brand sound like when no one is watching?
CMOs and founders need to answer this deliberately. AI is a tool—powerful, yes, but neutral. It can amplify clarity or blur it. It can help you sound like more of yourself or more like everyone else.
The brands that will win in this next era are the ones that strike the right balance. They’ll scale with efficiency but still speak with intention. They’ll leverage AI without losing the human quality that makes them trusted, relevant, and real.
So ask yourself: What parts of your content strategy can be automated—and what parts must remain unmistakably human?