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# Is your marketing made up? — Kelford Labs Daily
- URL: https://kelfordinc.com/is-your-marketing-made-up-kelford-labs-daily/
- Published: 2025-08-01T10:24:23.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-27T12:51:36.000Z
- Description: Or is it made for you?
- Author: Joel Kelly
- Tags: Daily Labs, ai, reality, creative, custom, effort

Did you hear the story about the [music app that had to *build a brand new feature*](https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/) because of ChatGPT hallucinations?

They noticed that more and more users were starting to upload a type of tablature that the app didn’t actually support.

Why?

Well, when they went over to ChatGPT themselves, they saw that it was telling users that their app supported this notation.

**And so many people had experienced this hallucination (another way of saying ‘confidently wrong advice’) that they decided to actually *build the feature*.**

Now, there are two ways to look at this story:

1) A plucky music app uses data to provide a feature their customers wanted.

2) ChatGPT is so wrong, so often, and so thoroughly that a business had to change its product to conform to its inaccurate world model.

Two things can be true at the same time.

**I share this story because people are getting *advice* from ChatGPT. They’re asking it questions about how to run their marketing, how to run their *lives*.**

In fact, people are relying on it so much that even some of its [*investors* are becoming deluded and paranoid](https://futurism.com/openai-investor-chatgpt-mental-health) because they’ve chosen to believe that it *knows* things.

Meanwhile, it can’t even accurately output the *real, extant* features of a music app without making stuff up.

**Because it doesn’t really *know* anything, it just *looks* like it does.**

The tokens that come out of an LLM can be thought of as holograms: the *appearance* of something without the *substance*. It’s like water that won’t get you wet. And also won’t cool you off, or refresh or hydrate you.

It *looks* like it will, but if you rely on it, you’ll find yourself suffering.

I say all this because your marketing needs to be [unique](https://kelfordinc.com/unique-not-better-kelford-labs-daily/), [creative](https://kelfordinc.com/kelford-labs-weekly-creative-writing-for-complex-businesses/), and [*tailor-made*](https://kelfordinc.com/custom-made-marketing-kelford-labs-weekly/) to fit you for it to work. It needs to be more than the *appearance* of marketing, it needs to *demonstrate* real value.

It needs to demonstrate real thinking and real [*effort*](https://kelfordinc.com/effort-is-a-signal-to-yourself-kelford-labs-daily/).

**But if we don’t expend any effort creating our marketing, it’s not really marketing. It’s more like a hologram.**

It *looks* like it works, but it doesn’t.

Because what comes out of an LLM is neither unique, creative, nor made for you.

**It’s hollow, like a hologram.**

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