AI Amplifies What you know. and what you don’t.
Whether you’re a content creator, small business owner, or chief marketing officer, you know the push to deliver engagement, growth or ROI. AI is now part of that equation. Delegating to AI tools can drive operational efficiencies. But there’s an important risk to be aware of:
AI amplifies what you know.
AI amplifies what you don’t know.
If you lack AI fluency or subject matter expertise, the amplification of your mistakes can be more than embarrassing. It can cost you credibility and revenue.
Why Expertise Matters
Subject matter expertise and prompting skills are not the same, and you need both to get good results. Subject matter experts know what good looks like. They understand nuance, context, and risk. Prompting skill determines whether AI can be guided toward that outcome effectively. The best results come when expertise defines the standard and prompts are used to get there faster.
Expertise is what makes the difference between output that gets results and output that triggers an intervention from your PR team.
The Problem with Prompt templates
The internet is saturated with AI influencers and platforms sharing prompt templates that promise everything from viral social media content generators to AI-powered ghostwriters that write in your voice. These prompt templates will deliver output. But there’s a trade-off: if you lack expertise, then you can’t judge if that output is correct or good.
AI fails come from gaps on the human side, showing up in three ways:
You don’t know the subject well enough. This makes it hard to judge if the output is generic, misleading, or just wrong. AI is great at sounding confident and convincing.
You can’t tell if the results are good or bad. Even if the results are technically correct, they may be off-brand, poorly reasoned, or disconnected from your goals. If you don’t know what “good” looks like, everything starts to look acceptable.
You treat AI like a shortcut instead of a process. Dropping in a single prompt and publishing the result skips the critical thinking step. Without context, review, and iteration, small mistakes can get repeated exponentially.
When these gaps overlap, AI is no longer a time-saver. It’s a problem multiplier.
To understand why, it helps to know how AI works. It excels at analysis: summarizing large amounts of information, identifying and predicting patterns, building frameworks. But it doesn’t understand novelty, creativity, or original thinking. That’s our job as humans.
AI models deliver synthesized output from existing information, presented in a safe, predictable manner—fine for product manuals but not for brand campaigns. Sometimes they make things up, or hallucinate, in an effort to deliver what they believe is expected, leading to false or misleading information getting published.
When you don’t know what you don’t know, you can put your brand at risk: generic content kills engagement, incorrect content kills credibility. Poor prompting can scale mistakes fast. And some fails have made the news.
This is why subject matter expertise and prompt engineering skills are the foundation for delivering quality AI output.
AI Works Best When paired with expertise
AI adds the most value when paired with human expertise. Think of it as a junior partner: fast, eager, but needing direction. This direction is what builds successful prompts.
Here are some practical use-cases to get you started:
Social Media: AI identifies what viral content has in common > AI builds a viral post framework > Human creatives write the content.
Content Repurposing: Human experts prepare the results of a study in long form > AI takes the input and delivers multiple formats > Human experts proof (and approve) the work.
Marketing Intelligence: Marketing team defines research parameters > AI performs research and delivers a report > Marketing team validates output and delivers insights.
In each of these, a human decision maker guides the workflow and has the final say.
Do you need AI guidance and training?
Schedule a discovery call to see how I can help. I offer coaching and training to individuals and teams who want to learn how to use AI to save time without scaling mistakes.