Turn down unhelpful noise of AI advice

It was fine – accurate, probably – but completely devoid of anything you might call a personality. Like receiving directions from someone who has never actually been anywhere.

Welcome to the world wide web in 2026.

There’s a concept doing the rounds called the dead internet theory, the idea that we’re nearing a point where the majority of online content is generated by machines not humans.

Whether or not you think we’re there yet, the trajectory is fairly clear. AI makes producing content cheaper, faster and more scalable than ever before.

Financial services is no exception – in fact it might be ground zero. There’s a lot of money at stake, a lot of complex information to parse, and a lot of companies competing furiously for your attention. The result is a lot of slick-looking nonsense. And some of it isn’t even nonsense. It’s just nothing. Technically correct, but so hollow the wind blows right through it.

This is less of a story about AI and more of a story about trust and how hard it is to know where to put it.

Think about the range of options for someone trying to get on top of their finances today. At one end, you can crack on yourself – comparison sites, apps, the odd alarming Reddit thread.

In the middle, there’s an expanding universe of guidance services, robo-advisers, targeted support tools and content platforms, all promising to help you make better decisions.

At the other end, there’s a human being who sits across a desk from you, asks about your family, remembers things, and helps you make sense of your actual life rather than a theoretical one.

AI-generated content doesn’t just add to the noise in that middle ground. It actively makes it harder to tell what you’re dealing with. Is this information or is it marketing? Is this guidance or a funnel? Is there a person behind this who believes what they’re writing, or did a machine produce it in 11 seconds because someone optimised for search traffic?

The uncanny valley, that unsettling zone where something looks almost human but isn’t quite, turns out to apply to financial content too. You can feel it when you read a piece with all the right words but none of the right instincts – it doesn’t quite pass the test.

Trust has always mattered when it comes to money. What’s new is the information environment has become so noisy that knowing who to trust has become genuinely difficult.

Which is, paradoxically, an argument for the oldest solution in the book. Independent financialadvice – regulated, human, accountable – remains the gold standard precisely because it can’t be faked at scale. Your adviser doesn’t just know about ISAs and pensions, they know about you. That’s not something you can automate. It’s not something a content strategy can replicate.

The noise is only going to get louder. The answer, as it turns out, might be to have a quieter conversation with someone you trust.