A while back I saw a meme that stuck with me. A guy is lying on the floor, either in trouble or already gone, and next to him is his phone and a jar of peanut butter. The AI app on his phone is mid-conversation with him, and it says something like, “I’m sorry, you’re right, peanut butter does have peanuts in it, and considering your allergy, you should avoid that. I’ll note that for future conversations.”
It’s a joke, but it points at something real. If you’ve used AI for any length of time, you’ve had a version of this experience. It tells you something confidently. It’s wrong. You correct it. It apologizes and moves on like nothing happened.
That’s fine when the stakes are low. It’s a real problem when chiropractors start leaning on AI for decisions that actually matter.
What AI Is Actually Good At
I want to be clear about something before I get into the warning part of this: I use AI constantly. Probably more than I talk to any single human being, honestly, given how much content creation and website work I do. AI is genuinely excellent at processing information quickly, acting as a sounding board while you think through a problem, and teaching you your way through unfamiliar software or a confusing process. I couldn’t do nearly as much of what I do without it, and I’m grateful for it.
So this isn’t an anti-AI argument. It’s a warning about what happens when you treat AI like something it isn’t.
AI Doesn’t Know What’s True, It Knows What Its Sources Say
Here’s the part that matters most. AI doesn’t independently verify anything. It’s pulling from source material, and it doesn’t take much for that source material to be wrong. If a handful of trusted-looking sources all say the sky is green, AI is going to tell you the sky is green. Confidently. Every time you ask. It doesn’t matter whether it’s actually true. It only matters that AI has decided those sources are where it’s getting its information.
This is why AI will blatantly tell you things that are incorrect, contradict itself within the same conversation, and correct itself over and over in an endless loop if you keep asking it to refine the same thing. Ask it to optimize an email, then ask it again a few minutes later, and it will often change its own answer just to have something new to say. That’s not intelligence working through a problem. That’s a pattern-matching system trying to satisfy the request in front of it.
A Real Story: When Both Sides of a Deal Get Told They’re Losing
A realtor I heard about had a house deal fully agreed upon. Buyer and seller were both happy. Then, independently of each other, both the buyer and the seller asked ChatGPT if they were getting a good deal. ChatGPT told the buyer they were overpaying. It told the seller they were underselling. Now nobody’s happy, and the deal that everyone had already agreed to is suddenly in question, all because of advice that couldn’t possibly have been correct for both people at once.
That’s what happens when you approach AI from a place of not really knowing what you’re asking or what a good answer should even look like. You end up trusting an answer you have no way to evaluate.
The Same Thing Is Happening With Websites and SEO
I see a version of this constantly in my own work. Clients, and sometimes people who aren’t even clients, will ask AI a question about their website or their local search rankings that they don’t fully understand themselves. They get an answer back, and because it sounds confident and technical, they treat it as fact. Then they send it to me expecting me to act on it.
I can usually tell right away when something is coming from AI rather than from the client’s own understanding, because the client doesn’t actually know what they’re asking me to do. Sometimes the advice is fine. Often it’s pointless, or actively wrong for their specific situation. The problem isn’t that they used AI. The problem is they didn’t have enough of their own understanding to know whether the advice was worth following.
AI Is the Newest Version of an Old Mistake
Chiropractors have been making a version of this mistake for a long time, long before AI existed. Years ago, it was common to hire a marketing person on commission because the chiropractor didn’t understand marketing well enough to train anyone or evaluate whether the work being done was any good. The chiropractor would hand off responsibility, hope for the best, and the whole arrangement would usually fail, because nobody involved actually knew what they were doing.
AI just makes that same mistake easier to make. It’s simple to ask AI a question, get a confident-sounding answer, and treat it as a decision already made. But the more significant the decision, the more dangerous it is to skip the step where you actually understand what you’re being told and why.
You’re the Captain of the Ship, Not AI
Here’s the core of it: AI is a great assistant. It is not a good leader, and it should never be treated like one. Being a chiropractor means being the leader of your practice, whether you have a large staff or you’re running things entirely on your own. That includes your marketing, your business decisions, and yes, your website and local search strategy.
This matters with patients too, not just tools and vendors. A lot of the retention problems I see with practices trace back to a chiropractor who isn’t leading, who’s letting patients set the terms of the relationship rather than setting clear expectations themselves. The same principle applies across the board: leadership doesn’t get outsourced, whether the thing you’re tempted to hand off is a staff member, a vendor, or an AI tool.
My Own Nine-Year Lesson
I’ll tell you a story I haven’t shared publicly before. In 2017, I had a paperwork mistake on my taxes. Nothing dramatic, just a clerical error. But I don’t like dealing with accounting, so when the IRS started sending letters saying I owed tens of thousands of dollars I knew I didn’t owe, I handed the whole thing to my accountant and checked out. I kept asking her if it was handled. She kept saying yes. It wasn’t.
Years went by. I kept getting letters. I kept disengaging instead of getting involved. It wasn’t until my accountant passed away and I had to bring in someone new that I finally got real information, and it still took me actually taking ownership of the problem, digging into it myself, and hounding the right people before it got resolved. What should have been a two-month fix turned into a nine-year headache, entirely because I avoided something I didn’t want to deal with instead of staying engaged with it.
That’s the same mistake as trusting AI, or a vendor, or an employee, with something important and then disappearing. The tool or the person isn’t the problem. Checking out is.
The Bottom Line
Use AI. Use it constantly if it helps you. But the higher the stakes of a decision, the more caution it deserves, and the more you owe it to yourself to actually understand what you’re being told rather than just following it. AI is an incredible assistant. It should never be the one steering the ship.
If you want an actual human to take a look at your website and local search and give you honest, understandable recommendations rather than a black box answer, you can request a free review at RocketChiro.com. And if you’re looking to build real competence as a business owner so you can evaluate advice, whether it comes from AI, a vendor, or anyone else, the Next Step program is built specifically for that.
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