That moment AI writing assistants had me chasing ghosts for 3 months

I was using an AI tool to help write product descriptions for a client's e-commerce site. It kept suggesting weird phrases nobody would ever search for, but I trusted it because it sounded smart. After 3 months of flat traffic, I ran the text through a simple readability checker and realized the AI was generating stuff at a college reading level for a basic home goods store. Nobody was buying because nobody understood what they were reading. Has anyone else caught their AI tool overcomplicating simple tasks?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason.paige1mo ago

My buddy Sarah had this exact thing happen with a recipe blog she runs. The AI kept insisting on calling a simple chocolate chip cookie a "confectionary amalgamation of saccharine morsels" over and over again. She thought it sounded fancy and professional until she saw her bounce rate was over 90%. Her mom finally told her nobody knows what a saccharine morsel is and she lost three months of potential followers because of it. Did you find your traffic came back after you rewrote everything?

craig.parker1mo ago

Three months seems like a lot of time to not notice your copy was reading like a textbook. Did you not skim it before hitting publish?