There's a critical distinction in using AI for marketing. Leveraging it to research communities and topics is a powerful efficiency gain. However, outsourcing the final act of content creation and communication to an autonomous agent sacrifices authenticity and is a critical mistake.
The value of participating in communities comes from genuine human interaction and building a tribe. Automating comments is not just spam; it misunderstands that marketing's goal is to be remarkable, not just to achieve engagement metrics at scale through robotic activity.
Tools that automate community engagement create a feedback loop where AI generates content and then other AI comments on it. This erodes the human value of online communities, leading to a dystopian 'dead internet' scenario where real users disengage completely.
When AI tools that automate low-value tasks like commenting are promoted as 'marketing,' it reinforces the negative stereotype that marketers are simply spammers. This damages the credibility of the entire profession and overshadows the strategic, value-driven work that true marketing entails.
Stack Overflow, a valuable developer community, declined after its knowledge was ingested by ChatGPT. This disincentivized human interaction, killing the community and stopping the creation of new knowledge for AI to train on—a self-defeating cycle for both humans and AI.
Marketers face a choice. The 'Industrial Revolution' path uses AI for mass automation of generic tasks, leading to spam. The 'Renaissance' path uses AI as a tool to empower human creativity, enabling marketers to become craftspeople who produce more remarkable work, faster.