By Leea Smith
Saratoga Sun
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

SARATOGA — AI-generated content is steadily making its way into Americans’ everyday lives.

Event fliers, social media posts, AI fruit drama cartoons—you name it. The use of Artificial Intelligence has sparked controversies across the globe, with people questioning the ethics of both the data centers that power it and the content itself.

AI’s rapidly progressing technology begs the question: Should it be seen as an innovative tool or should it be viewed as destructive and dangerous?

For some business owners, it’s a lifeline. 

April Martinez, a holistic health educator and naturopath in Rawlins, calls herself “a one and a half man show.”

Martinez runs a full-time clinic and competes for customers nationally. Without AI, she says, posting to eight social platforms each week would take her 10 to 15 hours. Now it takes about two.

Martinez has built her own AI agent loaded with her market profile, a style guide and

a knowledge base of her own material, so the tool isn’t pulling from the open internet. She uses it for content plans, captions, blog drafts and website projects. She uses Claude for strategy, and says its cost is worth it because she can’t afford a social media manager or a business coach.

“It’s my business partner,” she said.

Martinez isn’t uncritical. She reads every blog post before publishing.

“AI lies,” she said.

Even with firm instructions, it makes mistakes, and publishing blindly could mean spreading misinformation.

She also pushes the tool away from its default look. The newest marketing research she follows suggests the less AI-looking your content is, the more attractive it is, she said.

Her bigger concern is how the public uses AI for health. She started training her own system after clients arrived with medical advice from chatbots. One came in with a list of 13 or 14 supplements from an AI diagnosis. After testing, Martinez had her down to four. Ask four differ- ent AI tools the same question, and you’ll get four different answers, said Martinez.

The Artist’s View

Kara George, owner of Hobo Diva Designs, understands the appeal of AI and its capabilities.

“We’re Americans. We want it fast, cheap and easy. And it is,” she said. “It’s taking out the middleman, and when you can get a result within seconds, that’s where the appeal is.”

But George argues that the rapid production concept is the problem. As a professional graphic designer, she said a brand should be “recognizable, rememberable, unique, authentic” and should speak to the owner’s morals and values.

“If you’re putting out your marketing and advertising as fast, cheap and easy, what

does that relate to the customer on the quality of service or products that they’re going to receive?” George asked.

George treats AI as a tool and uses it to help brainstorm or problem solve, together with programs like Adobe Illustrator that she is already using to create her designs. 

Carelessness with AI is easy to spot, she said, and basic prompts produce basic, obscure results: misspelled words, even hands with 12 fingers.

Martinez recognizes a large con with AI.

“AI can’t replicate a human mind,” she said, noting that the human mind is simply far more complex and creative than any computer. She said she would hire a designer if she could afford one, but she also can’t spend three hours on two or three Facebook posts—she simply doesn’t have the time in her schedule.

Community Thoughts

The public is divided. On a Rawlins News and Chatter Facebook thread, Meg Doll commented, “I find most of my friends will not go to businesses using AI. Especially restaurants, as they will use AI generated images of food versus their own, so you truly do not know what the food looks like.”

Another comment by Jake Cruz read, “AI essentially took the creative nature and critical thinking out of making flyers with identity.”

Community members seem to notice the inauthenticity of AI flyers.

An additional comment by Desiree Nurton said, “AI generated content bugs me more than I’d like to admit. I find myself skipping AI posters because they all look the same—I don’t take the time to read them because they double and triple state a lot of the same things unnecessarily.”

Martinez sees the other side of the ledger. Many local owners aren’t tech savvy, and before AI, many posted nothing. She’d rather see them reach people, and she’s talked with the local down- town development authority about teaching owners to load their branding into their tools so that even AI-assisted posts look like their brand.

The Bigger Picture

George’s concerns reach past flyers and AI generated art.

“I think AI is very scary,” she said. “I think it’s an unchecked existential crisis, and we need to be aware of how we’re using it, what we’re sharing, how our kids are using it, because I think it is going to be a problem—more so than this surface level with garbage marketing flyers. This is just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Yet again,” she continued, “if we are using it as ethical and moral human beings, I think it can be an invaluable tool, just like many other technologies.”

However, George added  that safeguards are extremely necessary and might be left out for some big tech companies.

For small businesses, the question may not be whether to use AI, but whether customers can still find the person behind the business.

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