AI · Small Business · Your Website

AI Sucks Ass. Don't Let it Destroy Your Business.

No, AI isn't going to destroy your business. Using it without checking it might.

I lost a month of work finding that out.

I was building our own site. My first AI build. Weeks of coding, all 1,387 pages moved over, and I was at the one yard line and ready to score.

Friday at 3pm, before I pushed it live, I asked a bot to scan the whole thing for errors. It said it found a ton of them. Major ones.

I believed it. I didn't check.

I spent the entire weekend fixing things that were never broken. By Sunday night my build was gone. Not damaged. Gone. No backup, no restore points, nothing to go back to. I had to start over.

It lied to me for three days straight and it never once sounded unsure.

It was wrong and it was sure. Those two things showing up together is the whole problem.

TL;DR

No, AI is not going to destroy your business. Using it without checking it might. AI is very good at producing things and very bad at knowing when it's wrong, and it sounds exactly the same either way. Use it for drafts, ideas, and speed. Check anything that turns into a fact, a number, a name, a price, or a promise before a customer ever sees it.

3 Things to Remember

AI doesn't know when it's wrong. It has no way to tell you.

Two lawyers filed a court brief citing six cases that never existed. AI made them up, and it sounded sure.

You don't have to check everything. You have to check anything that becomes a promise.

I Use AI Every Day. That's How I Know Where It Breaks.

I'm not telling you to stop using it. I use it all day. I'm telling you it will lie to your face and never blink.

My business runs on this stuff. I build sites with it. I draft with it. I kick off three to six bots at a time on most jobs I do.

So a post called "AI Sucks Ass" from me is not me arguing against my own product. It's a complaint about one specific thing.

It isn't bad at making things. It's great at making things.

It's bad at knowing when it's wrong.

That's the only complaint in this post. Everything after this is that one problem, pointed at your business instead of mine.

It's Never Unsure. That's the Whole Problem.

These tools don't check whether something is true. They produce the most likely next thing.

That means a made-up answer and a real one come out looking identical. Same tone. Same confidence. Same clean paragraph.

Think about how a person acts when they don't know something. They pause. They say "I think." They hedge. You can hear it.

This doesn't do that. Ever.

You'll hear people call it a hallucination. That just means the AI made something up completely.

Here's the part that matters to you. If it always sounds sure, then sounding sure tells you nothing. You can't use your gut on this. Your gut is reading confidence, and the confidence is always there.

Two Lawyers Filed a Brief Full of Cases That Never Existed.

This is the one that should scare you, and it has nothing to do with websites.

Two New York lawyers and their firm were fined a $5,000 penalty in 2023 after filing a court brief that cited six cases which did not exist. ChatGPT made them up. When they asked it whether the cases were real, it said yes. (Mata v. Avianca, US District Court, Southern District of New York, June 2023)

Read that last part again. They asked. It confirmed. It was still made up.

Now, the takeaway is not that lawyers are dumb.

The takeaway is that checking things is literally their job. Reading documents and verifying citations is what they went to school for and what they get paid to do. It got them anyway.

If it got them, it will get you on a Tuesday afternoon between jobs.

What AI Is Genuinely Great At, and I Mean Great.

Let me give it real credit, because it has earned it.

It kills the blank page. That's the hardest part of any writing job and it's just gone now.

It explains things in plain words when there's nobody around to ask. No appointment, no bill, no feeling stupid.

It does in ten minutes what used to eat a Saturday. First drafts of service pages. A month of posts. Rewriting the same thing eight ways until one sounds like you.

And it gives a business with no budget a real starting point. That one matters more than the rest. Ten years ago, if you couldn't afford help, you got nothing. Now you get a draft.

I'm not being polite here. I run hundreds of thousands of sessions. My business would be slower and smaller without it, and I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

Here's What It Can't Do, No Matter How You Ask.

Three things. No hedging on any of them.

It can't know your business. It knows what you typed. Everything else it fills in, and it fills it in with what sounds normal for a business like yours.

It can't know when it's wrong. There's no little voice in there going "hang on." The wrong answer and the right answer feel the same on the inside too.

It can't be the one who's responsible. Your name is on the quote, not its name. I've written the long version of that argument here, and it's the whole point of that piece.

Checking It Isn't Extra Work. It's the Work Now.

Here's the reframe, and it's the most useful thing in this post.

You think AI saves you the writing. It doesn't. It moves the job from writing to reading.

That's still a massive win. Reading a draft is faster than making one. But it is a different job than the one you think you have, and if you don't do it, you're not saving time. You're just shipping faster.

Mistake: treating what comes out as finished.

Fix: treat it as a draft from a fast new hire who has never seen your business and will never admit to guessing.

Payoff: you keep all the speed and you stop shipping the mistakes.

That's what my lost weekend actually was. I had a new hire tell me the building was on fire, and I never walked down the hall to look.

Three Things I Check Before Anything AI Wrote Goes Out.

No tools, no login, no charge. These are mine and they take a couple of minutes.

1. Every number, name and date. If it can be looked up, look it up. Prices, hours, brand names, model numbers, years, license numbers. This is where the made-up stuff hides, because a wrong number looks exactly like a right one.

2. Every promise. Prices, timelines, guarantees, what you cover, what you don't. If a customer could hold you to the sentence, read the sentence.

3. Anything about your business it wasn't told. This is the sneaky one. If you didn't tell it, it filled it in. Go find the parts you never gave it and check what it decided about you.

If it turns into something a customer can hold you to, read it twice.

Try it

Spot the Made-Up One

Round 1 of 3. Both answers sound sure. One of them has something in it you never said.

These are examples I wrote, not screenshots. The point isn't to trick you. It's to show you what wrong looks like when it's confident.

You told the AI: I run Coastline Plumbing in Jacksonville. We do repairs and repipes. We are open Monday to Friday, 7am to 4pm.

You asked it to write the hours line for your contact page.

Pick the one with something made up in it.

Do it yourself

Have AI check its own homework

Paste what it wrote for you. It comes back with every fact, promise and invented detail.

Try it · Have AI check its own homework

I run a [TYPE OF BUSINESS] in [YOUR CITY]. Here is something an AI
wrote for my business that I am about to put in front of a customer:

[PASTE WHAT THE AI WROTE]

Go through it three times, once for each pass.

Pass 1. List every number, name, date, price and brand in it. For each
one, tell me plainly whether you can confirm it or not. If you cannot
confirm it, say "I cannot confirm this" and do not guess.

Pass 2. List every promise in it. Anything a customer could hold me to.
Prices, timelines, guarantees, what I cover, what I do not.

Pass 3. List everything it says about my business that I did not tell
you in the text above. These are the parts that got filled in.

Then give me one short list: what I have to check myself before this
goes out.

Rules: write at a 5th grade reading level. Short sentences. Never guess.
If you are not sure about something, say you are not sure.

Fill the [brackets] in the chat box before you send.

You get: a list of every fact, promise and invented detail in the thing you were about to send.

I've Built 278 of These, and It Still Lies to Me.

As of the day I'm writing this, I've built 278 JSX AI-interactive sites, and I stand behind every one of them. I just finished a few more, so that number's going up again.

I don't say that to brag. I say it because I want you to understand where this post is coming from.

Nobody uses this stuff harder than I do. And I still triple check everything, with my own eyes, not with another bot.

I kick off three to six bots for most things I do. Not because I want to. Because it fails at least 70% of the time.

Now, most stats and most sites disagree with me on that number. I know that. What I'm giving you is my own count, off high usage runs, for the things I use AI for. If you're using it for something else, your failure rate might not be that bad.

Doesn't matter. Check it. Then check it again.

Don't believe me? Try it yourself. Run one complex prompt in three separate chats. Same prompt, three different bots. I'll bet you one of them follows the directions, if that. The other two will be so far off it's scary.

I Can't Prove This Has Cost a Small Business Money.

I went looking for a case. A real one. A plumber, a roofer, a dentist, anybody your size who got fined or sued because AI put a wrong fact on their website.

I couldn't find one.

Not "it's rare." Not "the data is thin." I looked and it isn't there, and I'm telling you that instead of letting you assume I had something.

So why am I writing this at all?

Because the argument is the thing to watch, not the money. Right now, when AI writes something wrong on your site, it isn't clear who owns that. It's your name on the page. It's your customer reading it. It's you they call.

That question is going to get answered eventually, and it isn't going to get answered in your favor.

I'd rather you build the habit now, while the stakes are still small, than find out you were the case.

Use It. Just Don't Trust It.

What you want out of this isn't learning AI. It's getting the speed without the exposure.

You already know how to spot a bad quote when a guy hands you one. This is the same skill. The only thing that's different is that this one always sounds sure, so you can't use your gut. You have to actually look.

Use it every day. Check anything a customer can hold you to. That's it. That's the whole post.

If you want to see what a site built this way looks like, one that's fast and that you can change yourself, take a test drive. I'll put your site on my code and you can look at it before you spend anything.

And if you want the long version of how I think about all of it, that's what Balls Out Marketing is for.

Take a Test Drive →

Want the whole playbook first? Plan your attack. Balls Out Marketing.

FAQ

Can I trust what AI writes for my business?

Trust it as a draft, not as a finished thing. It's very good at producing writing and very bad at knowing when it's wrong. Check every number, name, date, price and promise before it reaches a customer.

What is an AI hallucination, in plain English?

It's when the AI makes something up completely and presents it as fact. It isn't lying on purpose and it isn't broken. It's producing the most likely sounding answer, and sometimes the most likely sounding answer never existed.

Why does AI sound so sure when it's wrong?

Because it sounds sure all the time. Confidence isn't a signal it's giving you on purpose, it's just how the output reads. A made-up answer and a correct one come out in the same tone with the same clean grammar.

How do I check if AI got something right?

Three passes. Look up every number, name and date. Read every promise a customer could hold you to. Then find everything it says about your business that you never told it, because that part got filled in.

What should I never let AI do by itself?

Anything that becomes a promise. Prices, timelines, guarantees, what you cover, what you don't, and anything with a legal or safety answer in it. Two New York lawyers got hit with a $5,000 penalty in 2023 for filing a brief with six made-up cases in it, and checking things was their job.

Should my small business be using AI at all?

Yes. It kills the blank page, it explains things when there's nobody to ask, and it does in ten minutes what used to take a Saturday. My own business runs on it. Just read what it hands you before anybody else does.