AI Isn't Going to Save Cannabis Marketing — And Brands Need to Stop Treating Criticism Like an Attack

Scroll through cannabis Instagram or Twitter right now and you'll see it everywhere: AI-generated product shots, AI ad campaigns, AI event posters. Somewhere in the rush to cut costs and move faster, a lot of brands quietly stripped the human element out of their art. And I don't think enough people in this industry are talking about it.

This isn't an anti-AI rant. AI has a place. What it isn't is a shortcut to good marketing, and brands that treat it like one are finding that out the hard way.

Here's the part that seems to get skipped in every “let's use AI for content” conversation: it doesn't work the way people think it does. You're not going to grow an engaged following by generating a character and slapping it into an ad. Instagram's algorithm and its users both sniff out AI content fast, and the reaction isn't neutral — it's often negative. Negative engagement doesn't just fail to help you, it actively limits how far your posts travel. That's not a cannabis-specific problem, that's every brand on the platform right now. But cannabis brands are leaning into it anyway.

Plantopia in NJ has been posting some genuinely useless AI-generated ads on their Twitter. I said something about it — pointed out that Toke Lane also has a drive-through, which was relevant to whatever they were promoting — and got blocked for it. That's the reflex a lot of brands have now: criticism becomes a personal attack instead of feedback.

Simply Pure did something similar with an event promotion. They put out posters that could've been for almost any brand — nothing distinct, nothing that said “this is us.” The card said “admit one, return for free gift.” Never explained anywhere that you had to actually buy something to get that gift. I only found out when I showed up to the event. That's not a hypothetical AI problem, that's a real customer walking away confused because nobody proofed the copy or thought about how it reads to someone who wasn't in the room when it was made.

And this is the pattern across the board: posters that all start to look the same, ads that could belong to any brand because nothing about them is actually yours.

None of this means don't touch the tools. Use AI-generated content as a reference point — a way to test concepts, storyboard an idea, or learn composition and layout before you build the real thing yourself. Treat it like a sketch, not a finished product. The brands winning with AI right now aren't the ones publishing what it spits out — they're the ones using it to get faster at doing the work themselves. AI was never going to be the savior of marketing. It's a tool for people who already know what good marketing looks like, not a replacement for the people who make it.

A lot of cannabis brands, from the small ones to the ones that should know better, don't have anyone on staff who's actually trained in PR or crisis communication. So when someone criticizes the marketing, it doesn't get processed as “here's feedback on our content.” It gets processed as “this person is attacking us.” That's how you end up with blocked accounts, defensive replies, and brands burning bridges with people who were never trying to hurt them in the first place.

Here's the math nobody's doing: for every one patient or customer you lose, you have to create enough content and spend enough money to bring in five new ones to break even. Losing someone over a bad reaction to fair criticism is expensive. Doing something harsh or petty in response — blocking, arguing, deleting — doesn't just cost you that one person. It reflects on the brand publicly, and it costs you the people watching that interaction happen.

At the end of the day, a brand posting on Instagram and Twitter is a content creator, and content creators live and die by how they handle their audience. Ludwig <a href="https://x.com/RollWitRory/status/2079049486152691859?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">talked about this recently</a> — when you mess up and your fans are calling you out, the move isn't to attack back. It's to step back, acknowledge it, and apologize, even if you genuinely don't think you did anything wrong. Because it's not about being right in that moment. It's about not pushing away loyal supporters, or the people who were on the edge of becoming loyal supporters, over something that didn't need to become a fight.

Cannabis brands are still figuring out who they are in public. AI can't do that work for you, and neither can ignoring the people telling you where it's falling short.