 AI Is a Tool. Not a Solution. There's a Difference. As I start this post, I want to be transparent: I use AI. Not constantly, and not for everything, but I use it. And because I work with small businesses every day, I think a lot about how it's being adopted, what it's actually doing for people, and what it might be costing them. The conversation around AI tends to go one of two ways. Either it's going to save everyone enormous amounts of time and money, or it's going to take over the world and eliminate jobs. Neither of those is especially useful as a framework. What I think is closer to the truth is this: AI is a tool. A genuinely useful one in the right hands, for the right tasks. But it's not a solution, and treating it like one can create more problems than it solves. The Call Centre Problem There's a pattern that's emerged in larger industries that I think is worth paying attention to, because I suspect we'll see a version of it play out for small businesses too. Many organizations have implemented AI to handle customer inquiries. And on paper, it looks great. The AI fields the simple stuff; wait times and costs go down, and everyone's happy. Except what actually happens is that the easy questions get filtered out, and the humans who remain are left dealing exclusively with the complex, frustrated, emotionally charged interactions. All day. Every day. With no break from the difficult stuff, because the easy stuff isn't coming through anymore. That's not relief. That's a different kind of pressure, and it burns people out. The tool didn't replace the need for human involvement. It just reshuffled where the hardest parts of the job land. And there is a real human cost here that will cost businesses in onboarding and turnover costs. Small businesses don't have the staff depth to absorb that kind of reshuffling. So it's worth asking, before implementing any AI-assisted process: what exactly is this filtering out, and where does that pressure go? Where AI Actually Helps That said, there are genuinely useful applications, and I don't want to gloss over them. For small business owners who do everything themselves, time is probably the scarcest resource. AI tools can help with things like drafting a first version of a social media caption, summarizing a long document, generating a list of ideas to react to, or formatting repetitive content faster than doing it from scratch. Those are real time savings, and for someone trying to run a business while also being their own marketer, bookkeeper, and customer service rep, that matters. AI can also be helpful for brainstorming, working through the structure of a proposal, or getting unstuck when you're staring at a blank page. Think of it a bit like a very fast, very available sounding board that never gets tired of your questions. Used that way, it's a reasonable addition to a workflow. The Cautions Are Real, Though Here's where I want to slow down, because I think this part gets underweighted in the enthusiasm around AI adoption. First: AI is not a substitute for qualified professional advice. If you're making decisions about your taxes, your legal structure, your finances, or your insurance, please talk to an actual human professional who knows your situation, carries liability for their advice, and can ask you follow-up questions. AI will give you an answer that sounds confident and reasonable. That doesn't make it accurate, and it definitely doesn't make it specific to your circumstances. Second, and I feel like this doesn't get said enough: be very careful about what information you're putting into these tools. Business data, client information, financials, and any sensitive information should not be entered into a public AI interface. The terms of use vary across platforms, and most people haven't read them. I'm not being alarmist, but it's genuinely worth understanding what happens to the information you share before you share it. The Bigger Picture: What AI Actually Costs This part of the conversation tends to get skipped in the excitement around productivity gains and time savings. But I think it deserves a moment, because the decision to adopt any technology isn't just a business decision. It's a small piece of a much larger pattern, and those patterns add up. The Environmental Cost Is Not Small The infrastructure that powers AI tools is genuinely resource-intensive in ways that aren't immediately visible when you're using a clean, simple interface on your laptop. Data centres consume enormous amounts of electricity. Training a single large AI model can produce carbon emissions comparable to the lifetime emissions of several cars. And that's before you factor in the water consumption required to cool the servers that run these systems continuously, at scale, around the clock. None of this means AI tools should never be used. But it does mean that treating them as a casual, unlimited, default option for every small task has a real environmental footprint that most people aren't accounting for. Using AI thoughtfully, for tasks where it genuinely adds value, is a meaningfully different choice than using it reflexively for everything because it's available. For businesses that have built any part of their identity around sustainability or environmental values, this is worth sitting with seriously. There is a real tension between positioning yourself as a conscientious brand and quietly consuming resources at the rate these tools require. The Human Cost Is Worth Naming Too AI systems are trained on enormous datasets, and a meaningful portion of that training relies on human labour that is often invisible, frequently underpaid, and sometimes deeply unpleasant. People around the world are employed to review, label, and filter content, including graphic and disturbing material, so that AI behaves in ways considered acceptable. That work is rarely discussed in the glossy coverage of AI capabilities, but it's part of the supply chain. There are also broader questions about creative labour. Writers, illustrators, photographers, and other creative professionals have watched their work used to train systems that now compete directly with them, often without their consent or compensation. Whether or not you find the legal arguments around this compelling, the ethical dimension is real and ongoing. When a small business uses AI to generate visuals or copy rather than hiring a local creative professional, that's a choice with consequences for real people in real communities. The Misinformation Problem AI tools generate responses that are confident, fluent, and sometimes entirely wrong. This is not a minor glitch. It's a fundamental characteristic of how these systems work. They are pattern-completion engines, not fact-checkers. They don't know what they don't know, and they won't always tell you when they're uncertain. For small businesses using AI to draft content, this creates a real liability. Publishing inaccurate information, even unintentionally, damages credibility. In regulated industries, it can create legal exposure. The responsibility for verifying what AI produces sits entirely with the person who publishes it. That's not an unreasonable ask, but it does mean AI-assisted content requires more oversight than it might appear to, not less.
Why This Matters for How You Use It I'm not raising these things to make a simple tool feel impossibly complicated. Many things we use daily (our clothing!) carry costs we don't often think about. But AI is being adopted at a speed and scale that makes it worth pausing to ask whether the default settings, the reflexive, unlimited use, are actually aligned with the kind of business you want to run and the values you want to communicate. For some businesses and some uses, the answer will still be yes. For others, it might prompt a more selective approach. Either way, it seems like a decision worth making consciously rather than just following the current. The Cost to Art and Artists Art is communication. It is progress. It is foundational to the human experience in ways most people don't consider; they just exist in tandem with it. For myself, it’s a huge part of what makes life worth living, so I am doubling down on this point… The buildings we find beautiful, the music that orients us during difficult moments, the illustrations that shaped us as children, the typography on the packaging we reach for without thinking. None of that appeared without a human being who developed a skill, a perspective, and a voice over years of practice and intention. Art is not decoration. It is the accumulated evidence of how people have understood and responded to the world around them, across every culture and every era we have record of. AI image and text generation tools were trained on that work. Billions of images, writings, and creative works scraped from the internet and used as training data, largely without the knowledge, consent, or compensation of the people who made them. This is not a hypothetical concern or an overreaction from people resistant to change. It is documented, ongoing, and the subject of active litigation in multiple countries. In January 2023, a class action lawsuit was filed in the United States against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, brought by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz, alleging that their copyrighted works were used without their consent to train image-generation models. That same year, Getty Images filed suit against Stability AI in both the US and the UK, citing the unauthorized use of more than 12 million photographs from its archive. In 2023, the Authors Guild, representing writers including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R.R. Martin, filed a class action against OpenAI alleging systematic copyright infringement through the use of their published work as training data. These are not fringe complaints. They represent a broad and growing legal challenge to the foundational practices of how these tools were built. Artists have spoken publicly about discovering that their specific style, their years of developed creative identity, can now be replicated on demand by anyone with a text prompt. A 2023 survey conducted by the Creative Industries Federation found widespread concern among working creatives about lost income and market displacement directly linked to AI-generated content. The illustration and concept art markets have been among the hardest hit, with numerous artists reporting significant reductions in commercial commissions. The legal framework is still catching up, and outcomes will vary by jurisdiction. But the ethical question doesn't wait for the courts to settle it. Using AI tools to generate creative work means participating in a system built, at least in part, on the unconsented labour of real people. That is worth knowing, and worth factoring into how and when you choose to use these tools. There is also something worth considering at a wider level. When we reduce the economic viability of making art, we reduce the number of people who can afford to keep making it. When fewer people can sustain a creative practice, the cultural commons gets smaller. The diversity of voices, styles, and perspectives that AI was trained on in the first place begins to narrow. What gets produced starts to converge toward whatever is most common, most average, most statistically expected. The richness that made that training data worth anything slowly disappears. Our community is home to a wide variety of artists. Their economic impact is not insignificant, but their cultural impact is immeasurable. We are already seeing a loss of viability among full-time creatives post-COVID, as they have pivoted to other careers or reduced their output. Losing more because we lose the inherent value of art and creation is a darkly depressing thought. But not a distant hypothetical. It is a trajectory that researchers and cultural critics are already documenting. A 2024 report from the Oxford Internet Institute noted emerging concerns about homogenization in AI-generated creative output, and the downstream effects on cultural diversity if human creative production continues to contract. For small businesses specifically, this matters in a practical sense too. Choosing to work with a local photographer, a freelance illustrator, or an independent graphic designer keeps creative work economically viable in your community. It produces something genuinely original rather than a statistically generated approximation of originality. And it builds a relationship with another small business owner who is navigating the same pressures you are. AI-generated visuals are not neutral. They carry the fingerprints of every artist whose work was consumed to make them possible, and they exist in a market that those artists now have to compete against, without ever having agreed to train it. The Brand Problem Is Subtler, and Maybe More Important This is the one I think about most as a marketer. I'm going to be direct here because I think the polite version of this conversation isn't doing anyone any favours. People can tell. Not always consciously, not always immediately, but they can tell. AI-generated content has a distinct texture. A kind of frictionless, slightly hollow quality that your audience has been absorbing long enough now to recognize, even if they don't have the vocabulary for it. The cadence is off. The personality is missing. It misses your brand guidelines. The flyer is generic. It misrepresents your business. And when your customers sense that something is off, the story they tell themselves about your business is not flattering. It reads as cheap. It reads as careless. It signals that you didn't think your product, experience, or market was worth the effort. For a small business, that is a significant problem. Your voice, your specific and particular way of showing up, is frequently the only real differentiator between you and a larger competitor with a bigger budget. The moment that voice goes generic, you've handed away one of the few advantages you actually had. And I want to be clear: this isn't an argument that you need to be a graphic designer or a professional copywriter to run your business well. There are genuinely good tools that meet you where you are. Canva, for example, has enabled people without formal design training to produce work that looks considered and on-brand. It offers AI-supported elements that assist without replacing your judgment. The difference is that using Canva still requires you to make choices. About colour, about composition, about what actually represents your business. It asks something of you and requires you to establish brand standards. Leaning entirely on AI to generate your content, your visuals, and your voice may not cost you in the moment, but it will cost you in the long run. Choosing not to develop even a basic competency in how your business presents itself isn't a neutral decision. It's a willful one, and it has consequences. If you sell luxury goods or position yourself as a premium service, the stakes are even higher. Luxury is, at its core, about perceived value. About the sense that care and intention went into every detail. The best campaigns are the ones bubbling over with human connection, humour, and emotion. And while AI can be an incredibly powerful tool, it can’t replace those elements that come through when you’re completely behind the creative wheel. And your customer who is considering spending real money with you is paying attention, whether you think they are or not. The businesses I've watched struggle most with brand perception are often the ones that treated their communication as an afterthought. Something to get done rather than something worth investing in. AI, used as a shortcut rather than a support, accelerates that problem. It doesn't solve it. Your brand is built on a recognizable voice, a consistent perspective, and a sense of who you are. Your customers, whether they realize it or not, have a sense of your business. They know what your communications sound like. They notice, even if they can't articulate it, when something feels off. The Skills Question The last thing is maybe the most uncomfortable part. If you outsource a skill entirely, you lose it. Or at least, you stop developing it. Writing is thinking. Working through how to communicate an idea helps you understand it more clearly. If AI is doing that work for you all the time, you're not just saving time. You're also potentially weakening your ability to articulate your value, perspective, and expertise. That might not matter for every task. But for the tasks central to your business and brand, I think it matters quite a bit. AI is a useful tool. I mean that genuinely. But it works best when you're the one driving, when you're using it to support your thinking rather than replace it, and when you're clear-eyed about what it can and can't do. The small businesses I see doing it well are the ones treating it as an assistant, not an answer. Want to talk marketing, branding, or have questions about the tools available to support your marketing journey? I'd love to connect!
Sources
Andersen, S., McKernan, K., and Ortiz, K. v. Stability AI Ltd., Midjourney, Inc., DeviantArt, Inc., and Runway AI, Inc., Case No. 3:23-cv-00201 (N.D. Cal., filed January 13, 2023) Getty Images (US), Inc. v. Stability AI, Inc., Case No. 1:23-cv-00135 (D. Del., filed February 3, 2023) Authors Guild et al. v. OpenAI Inc., Case No. 1:23-cv-08292 (S.D.N.Y., filed September 19, 2023) UNESCO, Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity, 4th edition (February 2026) Society of Authors (UK), survey of British illustrators and translators (2024-2025) Goldberg, S. and co-author, Stanford Graduate School of Business study on AI art market entry (2024-2025). Blood in the Machine, "Artists Are Losing Work, Wages, and Hope as Bosses and Clients Embrace AI" (September 2025) CVL Economics, study on AI displacement in the US entertainment sector (January 2024)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
