What AI Generated Cannabis Marketing Says About Your Brand

Let me address the bias here: I am a freelance cannabis writer and journalist. I have lost some clients to AI. I have good reason to dislike artificial intelligence and feel nervous about its proliferation across the industry (and our world.)

I’m not completely out of touch, though. I know that most of the cannabis industry is low on capital and big on cutting costs. I also spend enough time on the internet to know that nuance is a dying breed. I hope that readers will engage via thoughtful comments if they disagree with any of these points because there’s room for all of us to learn from one another. 



With that said, here’s my take on AI cannabis marketing tactics:

AI-generated images signal a lack of humanity

I know, it’s pretty awesome that you can take any idea in your head and type it into a little machine and have it spit out your vision within seconds. To some people, this is the pinnacle of humanity’s progress. It’s peak efficiency. 

Efficiency is the key word here. I know that cannabis companies are constantly struggling to make ends meet and anything that can speed up the process AND cost nothing is a win. 

But the result is almost always cringe. 

When I see an AI-generated image used to promote a brand on Instagram or as the cover photo of a magazine edition, I feel icky. The art feels soulless. It’s obvious that the higher ups don’t value authenticity or trust in the vision of a creative professional. I know that companies don’t often have the budget for an in-house or freelance designer, but guess what’s also free? Stock images. Basic editing tools. 

I know people have differing opinions about this. But I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever seen a company account filled with AI that didn’t weird me out. Are you trying to trick your customers? Why can’t we just see an iPhone shot of your products? 

AI blogs and other content contribute little value

I understand why brands go to ChatGPT and ask for a thorough explanation of terpenes, the endocannabinoid system, different product types, etc. After all, AI has become sophisticated enough to write pretty good versions of “weed 101” type content. 

I’ve tried to use ChatGPT to spit out some quick research for me given the downward trajectory of Google search. On the surface, I’ve been impressed. The little machine has given me a large pool of information to work with. 

But I quickly noticed that a lot of the information ChatGPT gave me was made up. Seriously, even when it directly linked me to a source, I couldn’t find the information it tried to assert because it doesn’t exist.

I have almost fallen for ChatGPT’s hallucinations. Once I’ve noticed that I can’t find a matching source, I’ve asked the little robot for clarification. I’m always met with an apology and praise for my “good catch.” Peak intelligence…

According to NewScientist reporting, those false-fact hallucinations aren’t expected to go away anytime soon. 

Beyond the risk of factual errors for those not thoroughly fact-checking their AI-generated blogs, generated content is, like AI-generated images, often soulless. These content generators are just pulling from existing content, contributing to an endless loop of the same repackaged information with an added risk of factual errors. 

I get why some companies generate their content using AI and can see some reasonable applications for it. But first-hand storytelling and expert knowledge from real sources? That makes for valuable, compelling content. AI can’t do that. 

AI use is antithetical to many company’s values

My biggest frustration when seeing excessive AI use is the ethical implications. Moreso, the way these ethical implications don’t line up with a company's supposed values. 

Brands who openly use “sustainability” as a core value are telling on themselves when they use AI in excess. Avoiding AI is such a do-able thing and it seems particularly disingenuous to promote a brand as environmentally conscious and then turn around and use AI to write the website copy and generate images. 

Here are some stats about AI’s environmental impact, as reported by the Sustainable Agency:

• “AI-generated text requires significantly less energy than AI-generated images. Using the most efficient text generation model studied, creating text 1,000 times can use as much energy as 9% of a full smartphone charge. (ACM Digital Library, 2024)
• Generating images is by far the most energy- and carbon-intensive AI-based task. (ACM Digital Library, 2024)
• Every type of query to a chatbot requires energy and leads to carbon emissions. However, queries that ask AI chatbots to think logically and reason require more energy than other types of straightforward questions. For example, queries asking about philosophy or abstract algebra lead to more carbon emissions than simple questions like the well defined history of a given topic. Some complex prompts can lead to 50x the carbon emissions than others. (Frontiers, 2025).
• When comparing electricity demand, a single Google search takes 0.3 watt-hours of electricity, while OpenAI’s ChatGPT takes 2.9 watt-hours of electricity. That’s nearly 10 times as much electricity needed. (IEA, 2024)
• If ChatGPT replaced the 9 billion Google searches daily, the electricity demand would require almost 10 terawatt-hours yearly. (IEA, 2024) That’s equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of 1.5 million EU citizens. (Our World in Data, 2020)

Soullessness aside, AI also takes a serious toll on the environment. I know it’s everywhere now, and I am not going to pretend I haven’t poked around with AI tools before. But the more I think about its impact on humanity, the more I feel put off by its use in everyday life, including cannabis business marketing. 

Goodbye AI?

The world clearly isn’t going to stop using AI. For some reason, people really, really, love not having to put thought into things. Like I said before, I get it. I’ve used it. I know it can help cut costs and speed up different things. 

But I think there’s also an argument for cutting back on AI use. I also know there’s probably a lot of content out there that I don’t even recognize as AI because of good prompting and tweaking by the humans that generated it 

I’d love to hear thoughts from those who use AI all the time, occasionally, and never, in their cannabis marketing.