How to avoid AI slop in your marketing and keep your customers' trust 

TL;DR

AI makes marketing fast, but generic or inaccurate content costs you customer trust. You've seen it: menus with garbled dish names, Instagram posts with impossibly perfect ice cream, posters showing burgers held by seven-fingered hands, or captions so bland they could belong to anyone. Shoppers notice AI slop. Use it for drafts and resizing. Keep your own facts, photos and voice in everything customers see.

AI makes a menu, a poster or a caption in seconds. Your competitors know this, and so do your customers. Statistics Canada reports 19.2 per cent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the past 12 months, triple the share from two years earlier. More AI output means more sameness, and shoppers notice. A Vistar Media survey found 43 per cent of Canadians are less likely to trust an ad they know was created with AI. This is AI slop: generic, error-filled content published without a human check. You do not need to stop using AI. You need a process. Follow these steps to keep your marketing sounding like your business.

What AI slop looks like

You have likely seen it on a menu board or a window poster. A Food & Wine writer described a restaurant menu with dish names such as "Crslay Fried Mussels Pot Ksascte Barno". TechCrunch describes AI menu art as eerily flawless, symmetrical and oddly smooth, with every scoop of ice cream perfectly round.

Customers react to this. A Toronto diner told CBC News AI imagery feels inauthentic and does not make her want to eat at the restaurant.

Watch for these signs in your own content:

Start with facts only you know

AI models learn patterns from large amounts of existing content. TechCrunch reports menu images look alike because the models draw on the same pool of past work. A generic prompt returns generic copy. Give the tool your details first.

Try these prompts:

Your brand look is a detail only you know, too. Instead of retyping your colour codes and font names into every chat, save them once. Create a one-page brand sheet with your colours, fonts, logo rules and a few words that describe your style. Then upload it, along with your real logo files, to a tool that keeps it handy, such as https://support.claude.com/en/articles/9519177-how-can-i-create-and-manage-projects, https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8554407-gpts-in-chatgpt or https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/15146780?co=GENIE.Platform=Desktop&hl=en. Setup takes a little time at first, but it can save you plenty of retyping and fixing later. Not sure where to begin? Anthropic's https://academy.claude.com/tutorials/intro-to-projects walks you through it. Check every result against your sheet, since AI can still get colours and logos wrong.

Use real photos for what you sell

Customers decide with their eyes. Business consultant and Schulich School of Business marketing professor David Pullara told CBC News great food photography sells. The same article reports experts say AI use becomes a problem when it misrepresents the product.

Shoot your own photos instead. Use your phone, stand near a window and photograph the dish or product as the customer will receive it. Save AI for backgrounds, layout ideas and resizing.

If your AI tool supports image uploads, you can upload your real product photo and ask it to match the style, lighting or layout. This keeps the output closer to what customers will actually see.

Check every word, price and detail

AI writes with confidence, even when it is wrong. Review every asset before it goes public:

Edit until it sounds like you

Treat the AI draft as a rough first pass. Replace general claims with specific ones. Add one detail only you know. Cut filler.

Example:

Before: "Elevate your coffee experience with our premium blends."

After: "Our dark roast comes from a roaster two blocks away. Try it with a cinnamon bun."

Personality matters. The Vistar Media survey found 69 per cent of Canadians say humour, emotion and entertainment make ads memorable. Those qualities come from you, not from a prompt.

Use AI for the work behind the scenes

Shoppers punish obvious shortcuts. A global Harris Poll survey found 73 per cent of consumers are less likely to trust an ad they suspect was made with AI, and 63 per cent are less likely to buy from a brand using AI-generated ads.

Put AI to work where customers will not see it:

Vistar Media's Canadian managing director says AI should strengthen human creativity, not substitute for it.

Run a five-question check before you publish

Keep your marketing human

AI saves time. Slop costs trust. Give AI your real details, photograph what you sell, check every word and edit until the copy sounds like you. This week, pick one asset, such as your menu, your next social post or your window poster. Run it through the five-question check and fix whatever fails. Then repeat with the next asset.