Why This Marketing Legend Downgraded His AI

Jon Benson told me something about AI yesterday that blew my mind.

In case you don’t know, Jon is a marketing legend. He’s the guy who invented the “VSL” (the video sales letter). And he built BNSN, an AI platform trained only on VSLs and other content that generated millions in sales.

I interviewed Jon yesterday for an episode of my podcast, The Story Power Marketing Show.

As AI models evolve, Jon told me, he and his team experiment with the new stuff to update BNSN.

Recently, the team upgraded to the newest, shiniest thing, and here’s what happened…

“It just sucked,” Jon said. “It went right back to sounding like ChatGPT.”

The upgrade made the copy worse. More AI-ish. Less human.

So what did Jon do?

He sat down for a month and ripped it apart. “We actually ended up having to go back in models to get this to come out right.”

He chose an older AI model. On purpose.

The guy who’s been doing AI since 2017 looked at the newest model and said… “Nope. The old one writes better.”

Here’s my take: AI has NOT cracked the code on how to write persuasive, human, authentic content.

As AI gets better, it gets faster, more logical, better at reasoning.

But every one of these models got trained on the same open internet. And the internet is full of gold mines AND garbage dumps. AI doesn’t know the difference. It simply parrots what it consumes. So it spits out a lot of garbage.

Jon put it bluntly: “The majority of sales copy online is atrocious.”

Newer model. Same garbage dump.

So when your AI output feels flat… don’t wait for the next release to fix it. The next release may be faster. But it’s still saying the same nothing, and it might say it in a more robotic, less human way than before.

A newer model won’t fix this. The fix is better instructions — frameworks that actually convert, fed to whichever model happens to write best. And as Jon has shown us, that model may not be the latest one.

That’s why I teach the P.L.A.N. framework before I teach anybody a single prompt — because without a proven, client-getting framework, your robot will type garbage.

Next week, I’m hosting a small-group, hands-on workshop where I’ll share the P.L.A.N. (so you can generate client-getting content without writer’s block), and I’ll show you how I’ve trained AI to write consistently authentic content that uses the framework to generate gold.

If you’re interested in a seat for this complimentary event (or the replay video if the timing isn’t right), reply to this email with “Goldmine,” and I’ll send you the details.

p.s. The Story Power Marketing Show episode featuring Jon Benson will drop on August 26. Listen (and subscribe) wherever you get your favorite podcasts.