“I wrote my whole newsletter with ChatGPT on Thursday and then I just didn’t send it.”

It’s something I heard recently from a client of mine, and it’s some version of a message I’ve gotten a dozen times this year.

The problem wasn’t that the copy was bad.  It was actually pretty good.  But weirdly enough, that was the problem. She’d knocked out in twenty minutes what normally eats her entire weekend, and instead of feeling relieved she had that slimy feeling like she’d turned in somebody else’s homework.

So it sat in her drafts. Where it made her exactly zero dollars. All because of her guilt over using AI.

I want to completely dismantle that guilt, because I think it does solopreneurs and small business owners a disservice and causes a lot of us to avoid a tool that could be a massive help. 

After years of watching one-person businesses try to do the work of six people, here’s where I’ve landed: using AI for marketing isn’t cheating. In fact, I’d argue it’s the first time a business your size has been able to afford a little help. And that should cause you to celebrate, friend. Not make you feel guilty.

Nobody has ever called a KitchenAid cheating

Let’s start somewhere that has nothing to do with marketing.

Let’s say you’re a baker who owns a stand mixer. You bake delicious, mouthwatering cakes that people go crazy for.

Nobody has ever looked at a birthday cake and said “well, you used the paddle attachment on your KitchenAid, so that’s cheating.” The cake is still yours. You fine-tuned the recipe, added your own secret ingredients, opted for vanilla bean instead of extract.

The mixer did the grunt work. But YOU did the deciding.

And every business that has ever grown past one person has grown the exact same way. Somebody hands off the grunt work so they can spend their hours on the decisions that actually build the brand and the business. 

Up until now, you’ve probably never had that option because hiring a marketing agency costs more than most small businesses clear in a quarter. So you’ve done it all yourself, usually at 11pm while the kids were asleep and after a full day of filling orders. 

But AI changes the game.  Not just for you, but for every small business out there. And it’s high-time you lace-up and get in on the action, friend, or risk everyone else scaling ahead of you.

So where does the guilt actually come from?

If I’m being honest, I blame school.

Somewhere around fourth grade you learned that getting help with the writing was the one thing you weren’t allowed to do. Show your work. Do your own homework. That wiring doesn’t switch off just because you’re forty-one, running a skincare line out of a converted dining room and doing your own Shopify updates at midnight.

But school was measuring whether you could do it. Your business is measuring whether it got done, and whether it brought somebody in. Different test, different scoring.

Here’s the question I keep coming back to when someone asks me if I think using AI for marketing is cheating: cheating who, exactly?

Your customer doesn’t want a writing sample. She wants to know whether your serum will fix the flaky patch on her chin.

If your email tells her that, she buys. She doesn’t care whether you drafted it in Google Docs, on the back of a Target receipt, or talking it through with Claude while nursing a baby.

Hot take: the typing was never the valuable part

Which brings me to the thing I actually want you to hear.

When you sit down to write a product description, roughly 10% of that time is the part only you can do. Knowing which objection your customer’s likely stuck on. Knowing the story about the batch you had to throw out because it wasn’t up to your standards. Knowing that the word “luxurious” makes you cringe.

The other 90% is staring at a blank screen, rewriting the same opening line six times, and googling “another word for elevate.”

AI is genuinely bad at the 10% and genuinely great at the 90%. Which is a fantastic trade if you’re the one trying to hold the full 100%.

You still have to know your buyer. You still have to have an opinion. You still have to look at a draft and say “nope, she’d never say it like that.”  But passing off the grunt work gives you the head space to think more strategically about the rest of it.

If anything, AI makes your judgment MORE valuable, because it’s now the only part that’s scarce.

What an assistant actually does for a business like yours

So let’s get practical, because someone telling you to “use AI” is about as useful as someone telling you to “do marketing.”

Think of it less like a magic content button and more like an eager assistant who works fast, never gets tired, and has zero opinions until you hand it some.

📝 It gives you the ugly first draft. Blank page is where most of your marketing goes to die, amiright?  The value in an assistant is that they can hand you something mediocre to react to, and reacting is a hundred times faster than creating.

✅ Try this: ask for five versions of your next email subject line that play at different hooks and angles. Read them through like you’re the CMO (which you now are). You’ll immediately know which direction is right.

🔁 It turns one thing into six things. That blog post you were proud of? It’s also a Pinterest description, three email campaigns, an IG carousel, and half your product FAQ.

✅ Try this: paste in something you already published and ask for four places it could be reused.

🧹 It does the jobs you’ve been avoiding since spring. Alt text. Product descriptions for the 30 SKUs you never wrote. The FAQ page. Nobody’s craft dies because a robot wrote the shipping policy — I promise you Etsy is not handing out authenticity awards for hand-typed alt text.

✅ Try this: pick the most boring thing on your list and hand it over today.  Like, right now.  I’ll wait.

🗣️ It’s a thinking partner at midnight. Sometimes you don’t need copy. You need somebody to ask you “okay, but why would she care?” until you find the answer.

✅ Try this: describe your offer, then ask it to poke holes in it like a skeptical customer would.

I have clients who’ve been with me for going on six years now, and the ones who got the most out of this year weren’t the ones who used AI the most. They were the ones who got strategic about what they passed off and what they kept.

Where AI will absolutely make you sound like everybody else

Now for the honest part, because I’d be doing you dirty if I skipped it.

AI will hand you beige, forgettable copy all day long if you let it. Open a blank chat, type “write me an Instagram caption about self care,” and you’ll get something that could have come from eleventy-million other accounts that also think “self-care is important”.

That’s the actual risk. It’s not that using it is cheating. It’s that using it lazily makes you invisible, which costs a whole lot more.

And the fix isn’t a better prompt. It’s giving it more to work with, which is a whole post of its own and one I’m writing for you next week.

One more thing worth saying plainly: an assistant can’t fix a strategy problem. If the pieces of your marketing aren’t connected, a faster way to make disconnected pieces just gets you more of them. I went deeper on that in you’re not a bad marketer, you just have a pile of tactics and no system, and it’s the bigger strategic challenge AI has a hard time helping with.

Speed only helps once the thing you’re speeding up is worth doing.

Put it to work this week (about 30 minutes)

Roll up your sleeves. This one’s small on purpose.

1. Open the list of marketing tasks you’ve been dragging with you week after week. 
2. Mark each item as 10% or 90%. Does it need your judgment, your story, your opinion? Or is it mostly typing and formatting?
3. Take ONE 90% item and hand it over this week. Not all of them, just one to start.
4. Edit it like you’d edit a new hire’s first draft. Change what’s wrong, keep what works, move on.  Give AI the final version so it can learn from its mistakes.
5. Notice what you did with the time you got back (hopefully it includes a well-deserved nap).

That’s the enitre experiment. And I’m pretty sure it’ll change your life.

tl;dr

You didn’t start this business to become a copywriter. You started it to make the thing.

Using AI for small business marketing isn’t cheating, and it isn’t a shortcut around the work. It’s the help every business bigger than yours has always had on staff, and that you could never justify hiring.

🧠 Your judgment, your story, your buyer → still yours.

⌨️ The typing, the reformatting, the blank-page staring → hand it over.

⚠️ Lazy use gets you beige copy nobody remembers. Directed use gets you your weekends back.

The email in your drafts folder has never sold anything. Send it, friend.

Let’s make sure it’s working on the right things

Faster marketing only pays off when it’s pointed somewhere. If you’re not sure yours is, start with the plan.

👉 Grab the 1-Hour Marketing Strategy Playbook and walk out with a plan built for your business, so everything you make from here on is bringing you customers instead of just filling a calendar.