UpTrajectory Review

Christine Slocumb's piece in Inc. tackles a problem most small-business owners have sensed but few have articulated: the more companies lean on AI to write their marketing, the more interchangeable that marketing becomes. The available text is brief, but the argument is clear — AI-generated copy has flooded the market to the point where it no longer differentiates anyone. When every competitor's website, email subject line, and ad reads like it came from the same model, the customer stops noticing any of it. Slocumb's counter is that the best marketing copy doesn't outsource strategy to a tool; it comes from a point of view that competitors genuinely cannot replicate.

For a small-business operator, this is not an abstract debate about technology. It is a budget question. Most owners adopted AI copywriting tools to save money on freelancers or agency retainers, and those tools do produce passable first drafts quickly. But passable is the problem. If your product page sounds like your competitor's product page, the only lever left is price, and that is a race most small businesses lose. The piece's framing — reclaim customers with copy competitors can't duplicate — is a direct challenge to the assumption that efficiency and effectiveness are the same thing in marketing.

What is genuinely useful here is the insistence that AI should not be generating content strategy. That distinction matters more than the usual AI debate, which tends to treat the tool as either a replacement for writers or a gimmick to ignore. Slocumb's position, as reflected in the available text, is narrower and more practical: the strategic layer — what to say, why it matters, and who it is for — has to come from the business itself. AI can assist with execution, but if it is driving the thinking, the output will converge toward the median, and the median is invisible.

The second-order effect worth watching is how this plays out in search and social algorithms. Platforms are already rewarding original, experience-based content over generic listicles and templated posts. Small businesses that went all-in on AI-generated content may find their organic reach declining not because of a penalty but because users simply stop engaging. Meanwhile, businesses with a distinctive voice — a founder's personality, a specific local angle, a genuinely contrarian take — will stand out by default. The cost of differentiation is going up precisely because the cost of generic content has gone to zero.

The practical move for operators reading this is to audit their own marketing against a simple test: could a competitor have published this word-for-word with only the company name swapped? If yes, rewrite it. Start with the highest-visibility assets — homepage, top email sequences, core ads — and inject what AI cannot fabricate: specific customer stories, real numbers from your own operations, opinions that might actually alienate the wrong customer. Use AI for speed if it helps, but treat it like a research assistant, not a strategist. The businesses that win attention in an AI-saturated market will be the ones that sound like themselves.

Watch for the broader shift Slocumb is pointing toward: a premium on authenticity that will reshape how small businesses think about marketing spend. If generic copy is free, original thinking becomes the scarce resource, and that has implications for hiring, agency relationships, and even how owners allocate their own time. The next few years will likely see a bifurcation — companies that sound like everyone else and companies that sound like someone. The piece is a reminder that the second group has a structural advantage that no tool can close.

Takeaway: Audit your marketing for interchangeability: if a competitor could publish it unchanged, rewrite it with specifics only your business can offer.