#279 AI Slop Is Destroying Your Marketing

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Most dentists are using AI the wrong way, and it may be hurting their marketing more than helping it.

In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down why AI-generated marketing content, graphics, website copy, and strategy often fail to attract new patients. You'll learn how to avoid AI slop, improve your dental marketing, create better ad creatives, upgrade website content, and use AI as a productivity tool without sacrificing performance.

Drawing from real-world experience helping over 1,195 dental practices through SMC, Gary explains where AI works, where it fails, and why current AI tools consistently struggle with dental marketing strategy. He also shares practical ways to turn one photo into multiple ad assets, create AI-assisted visual content, and improve your marketing without damaging patient trust.

If you're a dentist, practice owner, startup, fee-for-service office, or DSO looking to grow new patient flow, this episode will help you avoid one of the biggest marketing mistakes happening right now.

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Dental Marketing Goat is the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter, and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National, recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks, and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today, we're going to be talking about how AI slop is destroying your marketing and what is the right way to actually use AI when it comes to graphic design and copy and things like that. So AI's changing fast. So things that were like, wow, this is really cool a month ago, all of a sudden people are like, wow, this isn't as cool anymore. And people are starting to realize the holes in AI. There's a lot of them. There's a lot of holes in AI. If you haven't been paying attention, Uber just came out recently and said, hey, we spent our whole AI budget for the year on tokens in five months to use AI, and our app didn't get any better. So we're spending all this extra money, nothing got better. And now we just have this bloated code, and someone has to go back up and back through and clean this stuff up. And so if you're not careful, AI can actually have the opposite effect that you want to have on your business. I've seen multiple dentists online like, I'm using AI to do all this marketing stuff, which is great. That's awesome. If if you like spending your time rather than doing like clinical dentistry or running your business, if you like to do marketing on the side, that's awesome. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And if you don't pay attention, it will absolutely destroy your marketing. So I'll give you a couple of examples. You've probably seen these before. Online, you'll see people who, or maybe even just like in your day-to-day at your kids' school, at church, wherever, you'll see people make flyers. And these flyers or slides, they'll make these slides, and they're horrible. They're not not only are they not uh aesthetically pleasing, but they're just cluttered, they're noisy, and it's really hard to read. Like really, really hard to read. Now, it's more organized than if you drew it with your hand. So it took somebody who couldn't draw with their hand and it made it so they can make something, but it's actually defeating the purpose because when people look at it, it turns them away more than it attracts them in. Rather than getting them to focus, it distracts them because it's so noisy. And people, some people will look at it and be like, oh, this is awesome. However, from your marketing or if you're trying to get somebody to lock in, it's actually going to have the opposite effect that you want for what you're trying to do. Really, really important. Yeah, people make videos about this. There's there's there's videos with millions and millions of views with people with flyers that are like AI is just ruined graphic design. And they're when you watch them side by side, it's like, oh man, it's so cringy. Okay. So that's one way AI slot is absolutely messing in it messing up your marketing. If you're doing something that's repulsive to the bulk of people and you want to attract them to your business, your your AI slot poster is gonna have the opposite effect, okay? That's the first thing. And if you say, I Gary, I don't see it, don't trust your own eyes. Just like a patient shouldn't trust their own feelings when it comes to their teeth, like, oh, my tooth doesn't hurt. What do you mean I need a filling? Yeah, yeah, we have x-rays, we have we I can look at it, I can see it. I I know you don't feel it, but it's there because I'm an expert. Do not trust your own eyes when it comes to marketing materials like this, because you might say, this is the best thing ever, but you're turning away the very patients that you want to attract. Okay, so that's number one. That's number one. Number two is in your copy. And I'm gonna tell you how to do this properly. There's a right way to do this stuff. Your copy. So if AI is writes in a very specific way, and everybody's starting to notice how that is, and this started actually a while ago. And uh I'll be honest with you, like I use some AI to write some different things and some posts and things like that, and it was just like so obvious that it was AI and it wasn't me. And these big long posts you see on Facebook or Instagram or people who write things for their website, it's just very, very clear that it's AI. And AI does this, well, it's not this, it's that. It always does the same cadence, uh, a formula. It also uses M-dashes and just it uses several different other things. People can tell that. And you go, well, that does it hurt the algorithm? Well, it may hurt the algorithm, it may not hurt the algorithm, but if a human comes to it and goes, oh, this is just AI, then you're you're actually hurting yourself from a marketing perspective. So you want to make sure that a human goes back through it and writes it like guess what? Like a human. Because humans consume content differently. Now, is is can AI fix this and eventually get better? Sure. Eventually. Is it this year, next year? I don't know. I don't know. Can you use AI properly? Absolutely you can. Okay, so here's here's a couple ways that you can use AI in a very powerful way. Let's say you have images on your website, and you you took five years ago, you took 10, 15 images that you just absolutely love, and you want to use them on your website, and they're all on your website. But you need more images because you need to create ads. Because when you're creating ads on like Facebook and different things like that, you gotta have a lot of images, a lot of them. So you need to be able to crank these images out and do it quickly. What you can do is you can actually go in and take those images and just doctor them up a little bit. You don't change the fundamental picture. So when you look at the picture next to each other, it doesn't really change you or the way that you look too much. What it does is it changes the scene that you're sitting in. Maybe the last one you were in your home, and the next one you put him, put you in the office, and you put it with your office. And so now you have one original picture, but you have two different settings that you can use to do different ads. This is very, very effective. And I know sometimes doctors will see it and be like, Oh, I don't know, that is that me, I didn't take a picture there. The patient doesn't realize it. They go, Oh yeah, that's my doctor, right? So this is an effective way to use AI is to crank out a bunch of video, uh a bunch of images that you can use for ads. And again, you got to put guardrails on it. You can't just go in and just say, AI, make a bunch of, it'll just do slot. You have to work with it just like you would train a child to do a job. You have to work with it and train it and teach it what you want and be very clear and articulate exactly what you want and ask it to actually write a prompt for you. That's something that is very helpful. Just say, hey, write me a prompt to do this job, be as thorough as possible, da da da da da da, and it'll it'll go through and you have to describe it, okay? So it's a little bit of work, but that's very effective because it saves you a bunch of money. You don't have to go out and get 40, you know, 40 more pictures. You can take one picture and turn it into 10 more pictures. So that's number one. Number two, if you have like a a shot, an aerial shot of your office, or an outside shot of your office, what you can do is you can go into Google Maps, get an aerial shot of your office, and then get the front shot of your office, put that into AI and say, hey, I want a drone shot over the top of my building, and I want it for B-roll, and I want it horizontal so I can use it on my website or whatever you're using it for, or social media, vertical for social media, and I want a drone shot shooting over the top of my office. And guess what? It'll do it, and it'll look good. It looks really good. I've done them before, and no one could tell that we just doctored up a fake aerial shot because we used real images. Google has the aerial image already, and you already have the image of your office, so you put those two things together. Google can then or AI can then give you an aerial shot over the top of your office, and those are usually expensive to shoot. You just did it for free based on the information that you already have. So, this is how we use AI properly. We use it to make the things that we already have better. We can make the things that we already have into um better, newer options, but we're not just creating something out of nothing. Typically, that doesn't go well. Oh, just make me a website. It's not gonna be a great website. Humans aren't gonna love that website. Same thing goes for copy on your website. You can go in and take the copy and update it with AI, and it'll usually do a pretty good job. You still have to go through as a human and you still have to read it and you still have to work with it, but you can go through and get a pretty good copy out of your existing copy, but we you don't go into AI and just say, make me a copy for my whole website from scratch. You're you're just gonna end up with AI slot, okay? So the lesson here is this still the no free lunches. We thought there was gonna be some free lunches with AI. There's no free lunches. If you go in and you have no graphic design training, no marketing training, no copy training, and you're just like, hey, I just crank this out for me from scratch, you're gonna get trash back out. Garbage in, say it with me. Garbage in, garbage out. Okay, it's the rule still applies with uh AI right now when it comes to marketing. If you put garbage in, you're gonna get garbage out. Lastly, for strategy, AI for strategy, AI will consistently, like 10 out of 10 times, and I've tested this across multiple different models, will give you the wrong answers if you're going to AI for strategy when it comes to dental marketing. Why? Dental marketing super niche, super niche. And that meaning there's like marketing and then all the different categories of marketing, and then there's all the different fields that you can be in for marketing, and then there's dental, and dental's super duper niche. It's a very unique industry. There's a couple other little industries like it, but that's about it. AI isn't trained on dental marketing and it's a super niche thing. It uses basic marketing principles that don't always apply to dental, which will give you the opposite outcomes that you're going to want if you just go in there and just say, hey, just here's here's my stuff. Run ads for me. Do my ads for me, do this for me. Now, you might be saying, Well, Gary, you're the marketing guy. Of course, you're gonna say it. Who do you think's testing this? Like, I would love to be able to use AI for everything and lower my cost and lower labor costs and continue to grow without having to hire, you know, more and more labor. I would love that. But it's not there yet. It's not. All right. So, anyways, hopefully that was helpful. Thanks so much for tuning in. You have a good one.