Let me start by saying this: I am a massive advocate for Artificial Intelligence. I use AI tools like NotebookLM, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity almost every single day to streamline my business, write snippets of code, draft tricky complaint letters, create images and summarise complex research. When used ethically, AI is the ultimate productivity lever.
But lately, I’ve found myself fighting the machines, and it has forced me to question where this is all heading.
There is a very fine line between using automation to support humans and a future where robots are just talking to robots.
Selling, scraping, and scamming with absolutely zero humans left in the room.
Social media and online communities were fundamentally designed for human connection, but that core element is actively being stripped away.
Here is what I have been seeing on the front lines of my own businesses and networks recently:
The Ghost Community Manager
I recently chatted with a friend who has handed over the keys to her Skool communities entirely to AI. The AI doesn’t just assist her; it represents her identity and voice at scale. It automatically removes inactive members, sends personalised removal notices under her name, handles all direct messages, and posts content across multiple communities as if it were her. She also teaches others how to do this inside her community. Obviously I’m not going to mention who this is, because we are friends, with a professional relationship, and so who this is, is not important. This person had put a lot of work into building her community (as a human) and I do not want to put that at risk just because of my opinion.
Her members believe they’re building real relationships, but the experience is entirely simulated.
This blurs the line between real and artificial interaction. As AI takes over more of our communities and businesses, we risk creating systems optimised for engagement and sales at the cost of genuine human connection.
The 3.2 Billion Hit Bot Attack
Just the other day, I spent hours fighting off bots that were aggressively scraping and attacking our Cornish Whispers website. We received a staggering 3.2 billion hits in a single day, consuming over 3GB of bandwidth. When I looked at the data, 49 out of the top 50 IP addresses were from dodgy data centers.
I had to set up aggressive security layers just to repel them, whittling it down to the 15 or 20 “friendly” bots like Google and Pinterest. It is infuriating that the internet is turning into a space where bots are just constantly attacking and scraping data from other bots. The more blocking and security we put in place, the cleverer the machines get at finding ways around it.
The Unchecked Content Avalanche
I know someone who currently has AI fully automating and writing 10 blog posts a day, without a single human ever checking them. In my own book, I specifically warn against this: never use AI to write an entire blog post. Search engines are getting smarter and will penalise this, because users want genuinely valuable, human-written content. But it concerns me that this unchecked content is being churned out at such a rate, then more AI workflows could use this to do the same, and a huge misinformation problem develops.
In another community, a member talked about how they recently set up a system of AI agents on Telegram to act as automated chat representatives. She successfully got it working, but the system immediately burned through her ChatGPT usage limits as the agents ran wild. It begs the ethical question: Do people on the other end know they are chatting with an AI agent?. Should there be mandatory transparency so we know if we are talking to a human or a machine?
Finding the Balance
I am completely torn. I love using AI as a tool. It’s like having a brilliant employee where I am the boss who checks the work. But the machine is cold, with no feelings, empathy, or emotion.
Right now, humans use automation to save time. But where this is heading is a world where automation becomes the primary actor, and humans become optional.
We need to draw a hard line.
AI should be used to get inspiration, ideas, or to do the heavy lifting of raw data processing. But when it comes to conversations, encouragement, and community relationships, in my eyes, this must remain human.
As one of my community members Manda Jackson said from Skill & Soul Studio, I quote:
“If people discover they’ve been talking to an AI the whole time, trust disappears instantly. We already have enough trouble understanding each other without outsourcing our conversations to bots.”
Where do you draw the line in your business? Are you using AI to enhance your human connection, or are you accidentally replacing it? Let me know in the comments.
About the Author I’m Adam McCollough. I believe that Life > Work. Your business should enable your family & friends time, fitness, and freedom; not replace them. It took me a long time to grow my businesses because I am a hedonist at heart; I value time with my kids, landscaping my garden, and enjoying my life in Cornwall. I teach people how to step off the treadmill and build freedom-first businesses that fund their lives, using the skills and resources they already have.
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