AI is here to stay, and its influence across business is growing every day. More and more, we’re seeing business owners turn to AI tools to debug errors, suggest fixes, or even guide new features for their websites. While that might sound like a quick win, the reality is very different. In fact, some of the most common AI website problems we see come from business owners relying too heavily on these tools without the right context.
Context, context, context
Whether you’re consciously aware of it or not, AI performs best when it’s been given as much context as possible. The more specific you are, the higher quality your responses from AI will be. Under normal circumstances, any AI you talk to isn’t going to understand your website setup.
It won’t know:
- Your host
- Installed plugins
- Themes
- Custom code/styling
- Your branding
- Your customers
The list goes on…
This context is invaluable when working with your site, and without it you’re shooting in the dark.
Imagine your website takes online orders. A customer spots a problem in the checkout process, so you paste the error into an AI and ask for a fix. The AI gives you some code to replace a section of your checkout page. It even guides you on how to add the fix to your theme or site files. On the surface, it looks like it works and the error is gone. But what you don’t see is that the AI’s suggestion has altered your secure payment validation. Suddenly, customers’ card details aren’t being properly encrypted, and you’ve accidentally broken the legal and financial safety nets that protect both you and your buyers.
We once caught something very similar, where, had we implemented the suggested change, the whole checkout process would have collapsed.
AI website problems can waste your time
How many times have you asked an AI to “write me X about Y” or “give me Z,” and it’s come back with the most unhelpful, useless drivel you’ve ever seen? You then spend the next 20–30 minutes going back and forth with it, round in circles, just to get the answer you wanted.
Don’t get us wrong – AI has come a long way, and these kinds of situations don’t happen anywhere near as frequently as they used to. But they do still happen, and sometimes you have to abandon the chat entirely and start again.
When you get into something as nuanced as your business – or anything technical that’s highly context-sensitive – you may find yourself spending more time battling with AI and correcting it than you’d like. The end result may not always be what you bargained for either. These kinds of issues aren’t rare – they’re part of a bigger pattern of AI website problems that cost more to fix than if a developer had done the work in the first place. Graham has noticed a real increase in cases of developers having to “fix AI slop” in the past couple of years.
AI doesn’t care
This one goes without saying. AI doesn’t actually “know” what it’s doing – it’s giving you a response based on probability, built on patterns it’s seen before. It doesn’t care if its response makes a difference. Its response may not even be right. It just knows that when enough people ask for one thing, another thing is the most likely answer.
This boils down to you getting a response that is a “best guess.” We’re oversimplifying here, and in all fairness, for a great many things AI is spot on. But would you trust an employee who’s right some of the time, can only parrot what they’ve heard other people say, and is incapable of truly figuring something out on their own? AI doesn’t care if the response it gives you is actually helpful – but a human does.
You’re invested in your business. AI is not.
Sounds a lot like you’re just bashing AI
You’re right, it does sound that way. In the interests of being fair, we’re actually fairly big fans of AI. It has its uses in so many different applications. We use it to help with emails, simple coding tasks, consuming and summarising large amounts of information, and more. It definitely saves us a lot of time. We’re even looking into experimenting with AI tools to help small businesses and independents (the potential is actually quite exciting… If you’re into that kind of thing, like us).
But we’re aware of AI’s limitations and work within careful parameters. It’s all too easy to get swept onto the hype train and let AI dominate all areas of work and life.
So, before you instantly ask for ChatGPT’s advice, why don’t you ask for ours first? If you haven’t realised it by now, we offer free advice to (almost) anyone who wants it. We can even help you with some practical tips on how to use AI more effectively and avoid common pitfalls. You can drop us a line using our contact form.