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Key Takeaways Our decisions are increasingly shaped by machine-generated information that’s divorced from reality.
Founders often fall into two traps: algorithmic authority bias (assuming a recommendation from AI or a search engine is correct) and synthetic confirmation bias (chatbots reinforcing what you already believe).
Founders should verify data sources, triangulate the truth and run a sanity-check simulation to avoid automating their way into bad decisions.
I recently worked with a founder who said his marketing was “completely automated.” AI wrote the copy, scheduled the posts and optimized the budget. He was thrilled until his “successful” campaign drove zero qualified leads.
Sound familiar? Here’s what happened: He used SEO tools to find trending keywords, then fed them into a generative AI to produce content. The problem? He focused on what competitors did, instead of what his customers cared about. Great sounding content, wrong audience.
Today, our decisions are increasingly shaped by machine-generated information that’s divorced from reality. The hardest part of decision-making isn’t gathering data. It’s knowing which data to trust.
Related: How to Use Automation (and Avoid the Pitfalls) as an Entrepreneur
The self-referential internet problem
Every algorithm learns from history, but what happens when that’s just repurposed ideas? Google’s AI overviews and featured snippets sit above everything else, determining what we see. Meanwhile, content farms publish AI-generated articles optimized to feed that same algorithm. The result is a self-referential internet where biases compound.
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