INBOX INSIGHTS, July 16, 2025: AI Beefs, Which AI Models to Use

INBOX INSIGHTS: AI Beefs, Which AI Models to Use (2025-07-16) :: View in browser

👉 Download our new, free AI-Ready Marketing Strategy Kit!

INBOX INSIGHTS: Is AI Use Cheating, Context Engineering (2025-07-09)

Watch this video on YouTube

AI Beefs: What’s Really Grinding Our Gears

So there I was last week, sitting at my desk working on slides for our AI Kit course, and I thought, “You know what would be smart? Let me use AI to help create these slides about AI.”

Oh. The irony.

Three hours later, after crafting increasingly specific prompts, tweaking outputs, and essentially describing exactly what I wanted in excruciating detail, I realized something: I could have just made the damn slides myself in half the time. The amount of work that goes into prompting a system to make what I want is sometimes equal to just doing the work myself.

And that got me thinking about all the other ways AI frustrates us. Last week we talked about AI stigmas, and the response was incredible – so many people felt seen and heard. So this week, I asked our community on Slack and LinkedIn about their biggest “beef” with AI. This isn’t about solutions (though we’ll get there in future posts). This is about letting people air their grievances and realize they’re not alone in this era of “AI everything.”

The “It’s Making Us Dumber” Beef

Hannah S. hit on something that I think a lot of us feel but don’t always voice: “I feel responsible to myself to not be lazy and outsource all my thinking to AI. Might just be me being paranoid, but I don’t want to get dementia when I’m 50. Gotta workout my brain.”

Hannah, you’re not alone. There’s this weird guilt that comes with using AI – like we’re somehow cheating or taking the easy way out. Shane C. echoed this sentiment: “I don’t want AI thinking for me. I have a small business and I feel like I need to be the differentiator, which means my ideas are that differentiator.”

Here’s what I find interesting: both Hannah and Shane aren’t anti-AI. They’re pro-human brain. There’s a difference.

The “It’s Not Actually Smart” Beef

Todd B. called out one of my biggest pet peeves: “My biggest one is people thinking it’s actually AI (specifically LLMs) and thinking it actually thinks.”

Joy S. had the perfect analogy: “My husband says it’s the new high definition. Everybody used to say things were HD that weren’t actually HD. It’s the same now with AI.”

This drives me up the wall too. When people treat LLMs like they’re sentient beings making conscious decisions, it creates unrealistic expectations. Which brings us to…

The “Why Are You Like This?” Beef

Kelsey R. perfectly captured the frustration of AI’s confidence in its own wrongness: “when it gives me a very stupid wrong answer, or didn’t actually research what I needed it to. So I say ‘that’s not fully true’ and it goes YOU’RE RIGHT!. Like thanks, Chevin (ChatGPT and Kevin). I know that.”

Chevin. I’m dead.

This ties into what Tris mentioned about “inconsistent behavior and outputs from a Gem GPT with the same inputs.” Lisa K. expanded on this: “even if you use the same AI every time, every time you tweak that prompt, it gives you an answer that essentially takes a totally different train of thought than the first time.”

The “Human Problems, Not AI Problems” Beef

Christopher P. summed it up in the way only he can: “I have no beefs with AI, just beefs with the stupid humans who make it.”

Leslie dove deeper into this: “My AI beefs center around bias trained into the model(s) and the absolutely careless (and ubiquitous) deployment of AI everywhere with no way to delete it or opt out. Both of which are human problems, like Chris said, not AI problems.”

Joy S. mentioned environmental impacts and “people who use it to just play around without thinking about those impacts.” Again, human problems.

The “Corporate Replacement Fantasy” Beef

Sunny H. went full ranty pants mode (and I love her for it): “Companies who think that AI can replace critical thinking, creativity, or people (especially in situations where a human touch is make or break – like customer success or support).”

Jess H. felt this one hard: “AI support chatbots are driving me NUTS lately!! YES I looked through your help articles, no I don’t need you to send them to me.”

We’ve all been there. Trapped in bot hell when we just need to talk to a human who can actually solve our problem.

The “Mirror, Mirror” Beef

Pancho C. had perhaps the most honest response: “my complaint is not so much about AI but wish it would read my empty mind… I hate how AI can become a mirror showing and reflecting myself.”

Ouch. That one hit different.

He’s talking about how AI exposes our own lazy thinking – when we expect it to magically know what we want without us doing the work to clearly communicate it. It’s like holding up a mirror to our own unclear expectations.

The “Everything Is Falling Apart” Beef

Michael B. brought up the sustainability question: “AI is shaping up to be the next internet bubble but the hype is so loud no one’s hearing the voices of reason.”

Koreen P. added: “Companies think AI will solve their data problems, but it will only make them worse.”

These aren’t just technical concerns – they’re pointing to a fundamental misunderstanding of what AI can and can’t do.

What This All Means

Reading through these responses, I’m struck by how many of these “AI beefs” are really human beefs. We’re frustrated by:

Our own lazy thinking
Companies making bad decisions about AI implementation
The gap between AI hype and reality
Our tendency to anthropomorphize technology
The lack of clear communication about what AI actually is

The most honest among us (like Pancho) admit that AI often serves as an uncomfortable mirror, reflecting back our own unclear thinking and unrealistic expectations.

The Bottom Line

Your AI frustrations are valid. You’re not alone in feeling like the emperor has no clothes sometimes. The technology itself isn’t the enemy – it’s how we’re thinking about it, implementing it, and using it that’s creating these problems.

And you know what? That’s actually good news. Because human problems have human solutions. More on that in the coming weeks!

What’s your biggest AI beef? Reply to this email or join our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers.

– Katie Robbert, CEO

Do you have a colleague or friend who needs this newsletter? Send them this link to help them get their own copy:

https://www.trustinsights.ai/newsletter

In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the evolving perception and powerful benefits of using generative AI in your content creation.

You’ll discover why embracing generative AI is not cheating, but a strategic way to elevate your content. You’ll learn how these advanced tools can help you overcome creative blocks and accelerate your production timeline. You’ll understand how to leverage AI as a powerful editor and critical thinker, refining your work and identifying crucial missing elements. You’ll gain actionable strategies to combine your unique expertise with AI, ensuring your content remains authentic and delivers maximum value. Tune in to unlock AI’s true potential for your content strategy!

Watch/listen to this episode of In-Ear Insights here »

Last time on So What? The Marketing Analytics and Insights Livestream, we looked at creating bonus content for your podcast. Catch the episode replay here!

This week on So What?, we’re digging into generating video with generative AI tools. Are you following our YouTube channel? If not, click/tap here to follow us!

Here’s some of our content from recent days that you might have missed. If you read something and enjoy it, please share it with a friend or colleague!

Take your skills to the next level with our premium courses.

Get skilled up with an assortment of our free, on-demand classes.

You could be reaching 37,000+ marketers, analysts, data scientists, and executives directly with your ad. Want to learn more? Reach out and contact us.

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s do some level setting. At a recent event, an attendee commented:

“Isn’t ChatGPT 4o newer than the 3o mentioned here?”

This comment (which is incorrect) highlights the incredibly tangled, messy world of AI model names and makes it clear that a product marketing manager has never been in the roomr when these model names are made:

Seriously. Who did this?

So let’s do some level setting about what the general best state of the art models are as of July 2025, and what each one does in a very brief, compact format.

OpenAI

OpenAI has two models you should care about:

GPT-4o: an older, non-reasoning model that’s good for quick tasks. Not as smart.
o3: a newer, smarter model that does reasoning, very smart. Good for complicated tasks or tasks that require thinking.

Google Gemini

Google also has two models you should care about:

Gemini 2.5 Flash: the fast, lightweight model that’s good for quick tasks. Also not as smart.
Gemini 2.5 Pro: the smartest model on the market at the moment across all providers

Anthropic

Claude has two models you should care about:

Sonnet 4: The all around best every day model from Anthropic, good for most tasks.
Opus 4: Theoretically their best model, but so slow and with so many restrictions (you run out of uses VERY fast), it’s less helpful. Good for one big think a day, basically.

DeepSeek

DeepSeek also has two models you should care about:

V3: The everyday fast model, not as smart because it’s not a reasoning model, surprisingly good at coding, very cheap via API
R1: The smart reasoning model that loves to talk and talk and talk. Smart, takes a long time to get things done.

Alibaba

Alibaba has THREE models we very much care about:

Qwen 3 235B A22B: clearly not named by anyone who has an ounce of product marketing sense, it’s their fastest, smartest model.
Qwen 3 32B: their curernt best model that runs on most high end laptops and servers (you download it and run it yourself)
Qwen 3 30B A3B: another poorly named model, this is the fastest model you can run on a beefy laptop or server. Not as smart as the 32B model but 10 times as fast.

We cannot recommend the Grok family for anything due to safety issues.

That’s the LLM tech landscape right now. If this was helpful, let us know in our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers, and we’ll continue on with other model types next week, like image generation, video, music, etc.

Here’s a roundup of who’s hiring, based on positions shared in the Analytics for Marketers Slack group and other communities.

Are you a member of our free Slack group, Analytics for Marketers? Join 3000+ like-minded marketers who care about data and measuring their success. Membership is free – join today. Members also receive sneak peeks of upcoming data, credible third-party studies we find and like, and much more. Join today!

Imagine a world where your marketing strategies are supercharged by the most cutting-edge technology available – Generative AI. Generative AI has the potential to save you incredible amounts of time and money, and you have the opportunity to be at the forefront. Get up to speed on using generative AI in your business in a thoughtful way with our workshop offering, Generative AI for Marketers.

Workshops: Offer the Generative AI for Marketers half and full day workshops at your company. These hands-on sessions are packed with exercises, resources and practical tips that you can implement immediately.

👉 Click/tap here to book a workshop

Where can you find Trust Insights face-to-face?

AFT, Washington DC, July 2025
AMA Pennsylvania, York, August 2025
SMPS, Denver, October 2025
MAICON, Cleveland, October 2025
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, Boston, November 2025

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

Want some private training at your company? Ask us!

First and most obvious – if you want to talk to us about something specific, especially something we can help with, hit up our contact form.

Where do you spend your time online? Chances are, we’re there too, and would enjoy sharing with you. Here’s where we are – see you there?

Read our disclosures statement for more details, but we’re also compensated by our partners if you buy something through us.

Check out our new AI news roundup newsletter over on Substack! Get the AI news that matters to you – completely free.

Here’s the first issue!

Some events and partners have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them. Read our full disclosures statement on our website .

Thanks for subscribing and supporting us. Let us know if you want to see something different or have any feedback for us!

Need help with your marketing AI and analytics?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Pin It on Pinterest

Watch This Newsletter