The Savvy Seller with Kristen Doyle

157. Are You Making These Expensive AI Mistakes?

• Kristen Doyle, TPT seller, SEO coach, and web designer

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AI is everywhere these days, and while it can be an amazing tool, it's also becoming a minefield of costly AI mistakes for business owners. In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on some of the most common missteps I’m seeing digital product sellers make when using AI. From letting AI tools write your legal policies (please don’t!) to blindly trusting AI-generated website code, these mistakes might seem small but can lead to big problems with your credibility, performance, or even legal compliance.

I walk you through why you should never use AI for things like privacy policies or contracts, and why AI code (though convenient) can easily break your site if you don’t fully understand what it’s doing. I even share a behind-the-scenes example of how my own excitement about an AI-built automation backfired. The bottom line? If you’re not double-checking AI’s output or editing it to reflect your actual brand voice, you could be hurting your business more than helping it.

This episode isn’t anti-AI - far from it! I use it all the time. But we need to be savvy about how we’re using it. So if you’ve been tempted to copy-paste AI copy, take its “facts” at face value, or let it take the reins on your tech without oversight, this is your nudge to pause and rethink your approach. Tune in to hear what to avoid today, and come back next week for the creative, strategic ways I do recommend using AI in your business.

01:24 - Using AI for legal content like privacy policies or contracts

04:00 - Letting AI generate website code without understanding it

06:52 - Trusting AI-generated “facts” without verifying

08:34 - Copy-pasting AI-generated copy without editing for brand voice

Links & Resources:

Show Notes: https://kristendoyle.co/episode157 

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Check out my Everything Page at https://kristendoyle.co/everything

Kristen:

AI is everywhere right now, and I know everyone is talking about obvious uses, like writing copy with AI or using it to create images. But I am seeing business owners make some pretty big and possibly seriously damaging mistakes with AI. So today, I am sharing some AI mistakes that could hurt your website, they could tank your credibility, and they could even land you in legal trouble. So whether you are just curious about AI, and maybe you've been a little hesitant to start using it, or you're already using it every single day, this episode could save your business from some costly problems down the road. Are you a digital product or course creator, selling on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy, or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I'm Kristen Doyle, and I'm here to give you no-fluff tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process—things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations and so much more. Let's get started, y'all. So what shouldn't you do with AI? Here are some mistakes that can actually cost you. The first one is never, ever, ever, use AI for legal stuff. Now, I know it's tempting, you can ask chat GPT for a privacy policy, and boom, there it is, ready to copy paste onto your website. But every single word in legal policies matters. That's the whole point. Right? The words in the policy or in the contract, are supposed to protect you when things go wrong, or when someone thinks things went wrong, but they really didn't. The goal is that your contract or your privacy policy or whatever it is covers you. See, the problem with AI is they may not know what state you live in or what country you're in. They may not know what tools you're using on your website when you draft that privacy policy, or what different laws apply to you for that independent contractor agreement you had them draft. Let's talk about privacy policies for your website as an example. Your privacy policy needs different things depending on what's on your website. What plugins are you using? Do you have Google fonts loading on your site? What email provider do you have? Do you have a Facebook pixel or Google Analytics tracking code or other things like that installed? All sorts of little details like that really matter in terms of what has to go in your privacy policy. So when you use an AI tool, even if you try to tell them all the things that you have installed, chances are you're not going to know what all is important, because you're not an attorney, or at least I'm assuming you aren't. I'm certainly not. I use a tool called Termageddon for my website policies, and I offer it to my website maintenance plan clients as well, because it actually keeps up with changing laws and updates the policies automatically. It will send a question out when a policy has changed or when a law has changed, and I can just answer a couple of questions in normal English that I do understand, and then they will update my legal policies on my website to match my answers for the questions and to be compliant with those new laws. So definitely look into things like that, as opposed to using chat GPT or even just getting a static policy that was written by an attorney, because then those don't change, and these laws are changing constantly. Alright, the second one is one that my web designer friends and I are seeing a lot of lately. See, people hear that chat GPT can help with website code. And yeah, it can. You can ask chat GPT, or any other AI tool, to change a button color or whatever, and it will spit out code for you and tell you where to put it. But the problem is, if you don't understand the code, then you are basically playing Russian roulette with your website. I've had clients tell me so very proudly, I use chat GPT, and I fixed this thing! But then they call me because now three other things are broken, and they don't know how to fix it. So mistake number two is, don't let AI code your website unless you really know and understand the code that it's giving you. See what happens is, you get code from chat GPT to fix one problem, but it causes a different problem that you now don't know how to solve. Or you keep adding little chat GPT code snippets all over your website, and your site starts running like molasses because it's bloated with junk code, and that could tank your Google rating because of performance issues. I get it. I've been there too. I actually just very recently had a similar experience, not with website code, because that's the thing I'm an expert in. But I was so excited when I figured out how to create this automation in Make that had been giving me trouble. And I was so proud of myself. I had used AI to help build out this whole complex thing, and it was working, but I mentioned it to an automations expert friend of mine, and he basically said, oh my goodness, you built this in the least efficient way possible. And he helped me rebuild it properly, so now it is running so much better. The difference is, with automations, if I mess that up, I'm kind of the only one affected, at least with that particular automation, because it wasn't automating sending emails to people or anything like that, but with your website code, you could break things for every single visitor. You could hurt your search rankings. You could create security vulnerabilities, and it's just really not a risk worth taking just to save a few bucks. Honestly, most of the time when I have to go in and clean up that chat GPT code, what happens is that it has caused so many problems that it would have been cheaper and faster for the client to have just asked me or asked whoever your web designer is to do it right the first time. If you're on one of my WordPress care plans, those little fixes sometimes are completely free, or they might, if they are charged, then they would probably be super cheap, way better than having to ask me to come in and fix something later on. Okay, this next one is big, big, big. I use chat GPT and Claude all the time. I am not anti-AI at all. In fact, next week's episode is going to be all about ways to use it. But don't trust AI for facts, like ever. I can't tell you how many times AI tools, chat GPT, Claude, others have confidently, absolutely sworn to me, even when I questioned them, that something was true when it was completely and totally false. They will tell you a setting exists in an app when it doesn't. They'll give you step by step instructions to do something that don't work. They will state facts that are just completely made up. And the kicker is they don't even say, I think, or maybe you could try, they say it with complete confidence, like they are absolutely certain, even when you question them. I've had chat GPT tell me to, you know, go find a certain setting in a specific location in an app, or walk me through exactly where to click. Go here, click this, look for this, click that, and I go to the app, and that setting just doesn't exist anywhere. And when I go back and tell it, hey, that doesn't exist, it apologizes and gives me more wrong information sometimes. So as a rule, anything that AI tells you that's supposed to be fact, you really need to go verify on your own. Don't just take its word for it, no matter how confident it sounds, even if you have, in the past, said, Hey, please don't ever make things up anymore. Just tell me you don't know, or ask me more questions or whatever. Because, trust me, I have done that so many times, and it just doesn't stick. Alright, last but definitely not least, do not, do not, do not copy paste AI generated text copy exactly word for word. If you're like me, you can spot AI writing from a mile away at this point. You guys know, I'm sure, exactly what I'm talking about. It's weirdly perfect, never makes a grammar mistake of any kind, super polished kind of tone that sounds not like any human ever talks. If you ask AI to write something and then you just copy paste it word for word, it's gonna sound robotic like that, because AI is a robot. Is it getting better? Yes. Can you train it on your voice? Yes. But even if you think that you've trained it well, and the AI has totally nailed your brand voice, it didn't, I promise. It might be close, but a lot of times it misses little quirks, personality touches, and especially those little bits of grammar mistakes that we all make in our natural speech patterns that we wouldn't make when we typed, and those are some of the things that help people to connect with you as a human, especially right now in this world full of AI, let's just be honest, AI junk all over the place. Maybe, you know, I very frequently use the phrase or the word y'all I say, here's the thing. A lot, and AI can sometimes pick up on those, but it misses a lot of times the way that I have of explaining things that is uniquely mine. And it'll miss that kind of stuff for you, too. And then there are also always those dead giveaways that scream, AI wrote me. One of them lately is em dashes, that is the bigger dash. AI is obsessed with em dashes. It uses them constantly. And I have seen in lots of places, people who automatically assume that anything with an em dash in it is AI generated content. Funny enough, I voice recorded some brainstorm for this episode, and when I put it into AI, it put em dashes in this very section where I'm talking about how it overuses em dashes. And I will tell you next week all about my process for how I used AI to brainstorm this episode. I actually love a good em dash. I used to use them a lot, but I have started shifting to either regular dashes or commas, or just finding a different way to phrase things, because AI has made them so overdone. And I'm not the only one. Lots of other people have said I feel like I can't use an em dash anymore because AI uses them everywhere. So always, always, always go in and mess with the copy a little bit. Add your personality back in. You know, use that AI copy as your starting point, but make it sound like you actually wrote it. My best advice for that is literally read it out loud. And if you feel weird saying it, you need to edit some more. Because, honestly, your audience can tell the difference 100%. They don't want to hear from some robot pretending to be you. They want to hear from real, actual you. I just talked about a couple weeks ago, those trends that we're seeing right now, people are wanting content from real people that feels real, even if there's mistakes in it, because they are tired of AI generated, I'm just going to call it what it is again, AI generated junk. Alright, here is what I want you to do this week. Think about how you are currently using AI and I mean, really think about it and be honest with yourself. Are you doing any of these mistakes? Any of these don't do things? Are you copy pasting AI content without editing it? Or maybe you only edit one or two things and you don't edit enough to make it really sound like you? Are you using chat GPT to add code to your website when you really don't understand what it's doing? Maybe you're trusting AI facts without double checking them. If you are, zero judgment from me, I promise. We have all been there, myself included. But, and I say this with love, stop it. Before you try anything new, just resolve not to keep doing these things, making these same mistakes. It will really make your business better and stronger in the long run. Alright, now that you know what not to do, in next week's episode, I am gonna share kind of the flip side. I'm gonna share some creative AI uses you probably haven't tried, including, like I just talked about, the exact way that I planned these two episodes, this one and the next one, using some AI tools. You'll learn how to use AI without sounding like a robot, and how to make sure your content is unique to you and your thoughts and perspectives and ideas when everyone else's content sounds exactly the same because they use the same AI robot to write it. Plus, I'll share some really helpful ways to save yourself time, and a couple of just kind of fun things that I've been doing with AI in my personal life too. Make sure you click the follow button so you don't miss next week's episode, and while you're there, it would really make my day if you left a quick reading or a review for the show. I'll talk to you soon.