Let's Talk About AI

ChatGPT is gaslighting you.

AI is a tool. A good tool! But it is not your strategist, your analyst, or your copywriter, and here's why that distinction matters a lot.

Hey friend!

I keep seeing this pattern, and it's worth talking about.

Someone notices something off, an application gets denied, a number dips . . . and instead of just asking the person who actually knows their industry, they spend hours going down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT. They come back with a confident, fully formed diagnosis. And a lot of the time it's just wrong.

This isn't really about AI being bad at analysis. It's about what AI is missing, which is context across accounts. When I look at someone's data and something looks "off," I'm comparing it against several other accounts I manage in the same space. A lot of times that same "off" number shows up across all of them. That's just how this type of audience behaves. People find you a certain way, behave a certain way, and that shows up in the data a certain way. It's expected. It's not a problem.

ChatGPT doesn't have that comparison set. It looks at your numbers in isolation, finds something that looks like an outlier, and builds a confident sounding story around it. The story is coherent, the tone is authoritative, and it can point at completely the wrong thing, because without a baseline across a bunch of similar accounts, there's no way to tell "normal for accounts like yours" from "actual problem."

So when someone spends hours diagnosing a problem with AI and walks away with a confident conclusion, I think the right question is: confident compared to what? If the AI hasn't seen a dozen similar accounts to compare against, it's pattern matching on a sample size of one. And a sample size of one can make anything look like a red flag.

This one actually is ChatGPT’s fault

ChatGPT is trained on an enormous amount of general information. It knows what certain data points usually means in a general marketing context. And it's very good at building a confident, detailed, well-structured case using that general knowledge.

What it cannot do is know that in the specific world of food blogging, with your specific mix of traffic sources, those certain data points might actually be completely normal. It doesn't know what patterns look alarming vs. what patterns just look that way if you have never seen a hundred similar accounts. It has no personal, human experience. It only has information. And it doesn't know what it does not know.

There is a clinical term for what AI does when it fills gaps with plausible-sounding information it doesn't actually have: confabulation. It hallucinates. It constructs a coherent, confident-sounding narrative out of general patterns and presents it as a specific analysis. It doesn't flag uncertainty or say "I'm not sure this applies to your situation." It gives you the general version of an answer dressed up as a specific one, and that confidence is persuasive. It's flawed.

The Core Problem AI cannot accurately diagnose your website, your traffic, or your business. It can describe what your data looks like in general terms. It can't tell you what it means for you specifically, in your niche, with your history, on your platform.

Where AI actually belongs in your workflow

We aren't anti-AI. We use it because there are genuinely good use cases. AI is a strong writing assistant when you are stuck on one sentence, one transition, one way to phrase a tip you know how to say out loud but cannot get onto the page. That is a real, useful application. Paste the paragraph, ask for help finding a better way to say the thing, then rewrite it in your own words.

What it is not is your copywriter. And this is where we see bloggers making a mistake that will genuinely hurt them long-term.

Your voice is your business. It is not just a stylistic preference. It's the reason people come back. It is the reason someone subscribes to your newsletter instead of just Googling the recipe. It's the thing that turns a one-time visitor into a loyal reader who trusts that when you say a recipe works, it works, because you made it, you ate it, and you are a real human being who has strong opinions about the crumble-to-fruit ratio in a peach crisp. When you write an entire post with AI, that's all gone. The tips are generic. The voice is generic. The personality is generic. Readers are getting better and better at sensing this, even when they cannot articulate what feels off.

✓ Use AI For This Rewriting ONE sentence you're stuck on Brainstorming (not creating) content ideas or headline options Explaining a general concept in plain English Summarizing a long document Low-stakes tasks with clear, verifiable outputs

✕ Don’t Use AI For This Writing your entire blog post Diagnosing why your traffic is down Deciding whether your analytics are normal Understanding ad network requirements Any decision where your niche context matters

Why this is genuinely frustrating from where we sit

When a client comes to us having already spent hours with ChatGPT, the diagnosis is usually wrong and now we have to undo it. It isn't just that ChatGPT gave bad advice, but that the advice was delivered with so much confidence and so much detail that the person sitting across from us on a call has already decided what the problem is. They're not coming with an open question. They're coming looking for confirmation of the answer they already got.

We have years of experience specifically in the food blogging and content creator space. We have worked with hundreds of accounts. We've seen what healthy traffic looks like, what tanked traffic looks like, what a one-viral-post spike looks like versus real growth. ChatGPT has read a lot of articles about these topics - and those are fundamentally different things. Come to us with the question first. Use ChatGPT to help you write the email asking us.

If something important is on the line, you want someone in your corner who has seen this before. Not just read about it! Seen it. If you want that kind of support, you know where to find us. Just reply.

P.S.

Stop using AI-generated graphics on your blog and social media.

Not because Google will penalize you for it directly, because your readers are increasingly aware of AI content, and AI food imagery specifically has become associated with content farms publishing untested, unreliable recipes. The founders of Inspired Taste described AI-generated recipe content to NPR as “Frankenstein” combinations that are not tested, not authored, and in some cases not accurate. Instacart actually removed AI-generated food images from their platform after consumer backlash.

When someone sees an AI-generated graphic on your account, they don't just question that one image, they question whether your recipes are real, whether you actually made any of this, and whether any of it is actually you. That association is hard to undo. Your real photography (even if it's not perfect!), your real voice, your actually-tested recipes are the thing nobody can replicate. Protect that.

Work With Honeycomb Media Want someone who actually knows your niche in your corner? We handle SEO copywriting, Pinterest strategy, Instagram and Facebook content, email marketing, SEO, and full marketing retainers built around sustainable growth. Real strategy from people who work in this space every day. Reply and let’s talk. Reply to Get Started →