Why Your AI-Generated Marketing Content Sounds Generic And What To Do About It

TechWhy Your AI-Generated Marketing Content Sounds Generic And What To Do About ItByStu Sjouwerman,Forbes Councils Member.for Forbes Technology CouncilCOUNCIL POSTExpertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based)May 22, 2026, 08:00am EDTStu Sjouwerman is co-founder and CEO of ReadingMinds, a pioneering AI-moderated interview platform for conducting sentiment analysis. gettyRead enough AI-generated marketing content and you’ll start to see a pretty consistent pattern. The vocabulary is right, the structure is clean, the argument is coherent and yet it just doesn’t sound like it came from anyone in particular. It sounds disembodied.That’s not a coincidence. AI language models are trained largely on publicly available text, including an enormous volume of existing, often average marketing content. So, when a model learns to write marketing copy, it learns from the full repository of everything that has already been written—including every forgettable blog post, every bland value proposition and every landing page that says "streamline your operations" without explaining what that means. It is designed to optimize for outputs that are broadly acceptable across the widest possible range of readers.That generic output doesn’t represent a failure. The model is performing exactly as designed.The Problem With PromptsAI prompts are typically built on standard industry terminology, rehashed competitive positioning and category language. In short, these prompts ask AI to use the same vocabulary the same way it’s already used—the way “everybody” uses it.Generic prompts cannot give these models something they don’t already have, and what they don’t have is the specific, unscripted language your customers use when they describe the problem you solve—in their own words, in their own voice and before anyone has coached them into the language of your category.The One Input The Model Has Never...