Brilliant drafter. Confident guesser.
Give it your real facts in writing, tell it to say “I don’t know” instead of guessing, and never let anything it writes go out until a person has checked it. Your job is to leave it fewer gaps and check what’s left.
Henny Maltby25 years in marketing · Growth Hub Premier Partner · 26 October 2026
!Ever found a price you never set? AI fills gaps with confident guesses.
AI is a brilliant first drafter, but it fills gaps with confident guesses.
This worries a lot of business owners, and fairly so. In a 2026 survey of UK small business decision makers by IONOS and YouGov, almost half (49%) named unreliable or made up answers as a barrier to using AI.
When Anthropic, the company behind Claude, spoke to small business owners, one thing came up again and again: the people getting real value had learned to check AI’s results rather than take them at face value.
Not avoiding AI. Checking it.
Why it happens
AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude write by predicting what a good answer would most likely say. That’s why they’re so quick. It’s also why, when they don’t know something, they don’t stop. They write what sounds right.
Ask it for a post about your Saturday workshop and it doesn’t know your price, so it may write a believable one. Ask for a “customer quote” and it may write one that no customer ever said. It isn’t lying on purpose. It just has a gap, and it fills it.
My own example
Yes. When I was building the courses for my Academy, I had AI write the first drafts overnight. Four courses were written while I slept. Writing them myself would have taken me about a month.
But every morning I read every word. And every so often it had stated something that simply wasn’t true, or put words in my mouth that I’d never said. Not often, but often enough that if I’d published without checking, my name would have been on things I didn’t believe.
So I don’t stop using it. I give it better information, clearer rules, and I read before anything goes anywhere.
I read every word before it goes out
AI drafts. A person decides. That one rule saves more embarrassment than any clever tool.
The rules I use
These are the six rules I use myself and teach in the Academy.
Prices, opening hours, what’s included, where you work, what you don’t do. Out of the box AI knows nothing about your business, so it guesses. Hand it a written page of facts and it has far less to guess about.
Say plainly: if the answer isn’t in what I’ve given you, tell me rather than filling the gap. It will follow that rule if you ask.
If it gives you a statistic or a fact from outside your notes, ask where it came from and for a link. Then open the link. If there’s no source, don’t use it.
These are the four that do real damage. Only real reviews from real customers, only your real prices, only numbers you can point to.
I can take a client’s own room photo and show it dressed for a wedding or a workshop for about 3p an image, instead of paying for a photo shoot. That’s fair, because it’s their real room. A picture of a grander room they don’t have would not be.
Every post, email and web page. No exceptions, however busy the week.
Try it today
Paste this in at the start of a chat, or better still, save it as a standing instruction so it’s there every time.
In the Your AI Marketing Brain course, this is exactly what you build: one place holding your facts, your customers, how you talk and your rules, so your AI starts every job knowing the truth about your business instead of guessing it.
Rules for everything you write for my business:
1. Only use the facts I have given you in writing. If something isn’t there, don’t fill the gap.
2. If you don’t know or aren’t sure, say “I don’t know” and ask me.
3. Never invent prices, reviews, testimonials, customer names, statistics or results. If one is needed, leave a gap marked [CHECK] for me to fill.
4. If you use any fact that isn’t in my notes, tell me where it came from with a link so I can check it.
5. At the end, list anything you have assumed and anything I should double check before this goes out.
Keep this beside you
It takes a few minutes and it catches nearly everything.
Where it slips in
Still worth it?
Completely. Checking a draft takes minutes. Writing from a blank page takes hours, and for my courses it would have taken weeks. The checking is the bit where you add what only you know.
Social media is where most owners feel this first, because it’s where you post most often. The Create a Month of Social Posts With AI course (coming soon) shows you how to get a full month of posts drafted in your voice, with a simple review step so nothing goes out until you’ve said yes.
If you’d like to see where your marketing stands before you start, the free marketing review takes about 8 minutes. It looks your business up and shows you where you’re losing customers.
An AI that knows your business
The AI Marketing Academy opens fully on 14 November. You’ll build your own AI Marketing Brain, with the rules that stop it guessing built in from the start. You teach it, your AI does the work, and you stay in control.
Your questions answered
The questions I’m asked most about trusting what AI writes.
You can trust it to write a strong first draft, as long as you give it your real facts and a person checks the result before it goes out. Treat it like a capable new member of staff: quick and useful, but not the final say.
Google has said it ranks content on quality, however it was produced. It doesn’t punish AI, it punishes average content. Writing that is accurate, specific to your business and genuinely useful is what counts.
Yes, as long as the image reflects roughly what your customers will really get. Showing your own room dressed for an event is fair. Showing a room, product or result you can’t deliver is not.
Far less time than writing it yourself. Most of the work is reading it through once with the checklist in this post beside you, and fixing anything that isn’t true or doesn’t sound like you.
Where to start
When the AI knows your facts and follows your rules, there is much less to fix, and what it writes starts to sound like you rather than like everybody else.
That’s why I build every Academy course around real marketing, with AI inside it, rather than handing people a tool and wishing them luck. You start by building your own AI Marketing Brain: an AI that knows your facts, your customers and how you talk, with rules that stop it guessing.
A free start, then step by step to an AI that knows your business. The first course, How Marketing Really Works, is free.
Want to talk it through first?
My private 1:1 marketing sessions are worth £150 an hour, and your first hour is free. We’ll look at what AI is writing for you and set up the rules that stop it guessing about your business.
Pink Elephant AI Marketing Academy
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