Is AI actually printing money for you in 2026, or did it just kill real Internet Marketing? (Let's be honest)

Hey Loungers,
I’ve been staying up late reviewing some automation scripts and looking at the current state of traffic generation this year. I think we need to have a brutal, honest reality check here.
Back in the day, if you knew how to spin content, scrape clean proxies, or rank micro-niche sites on classifieds, you were basically printing cash. It took effort, technical grinding, and real marketing wit.
Fast forward to 2026, and everyone and their grandma is a "Traffic Guru" thanks to AI.
People are generating 10,000 automated social posts a day, scraping LinkedIn with zero effort, and blasting generic OpenAI content everywhere. But let’s look at the dark side:

1. Big platforms (Google, Meta, Craigslist, etc.) have deployed massive AI anti-spam algorithms that are mass-banning automated matrices faster than ever.
2. Buyers are getting hit with so much generic AI outreach that they have completely developed "bot-blindness." They only reply to raw, highly personalized human interactions now.

So here is my question to the veterans and the new blood on BHW:
Are you guys genuinely scaling your income using AI automation right now, or are you finding that returning to raw, high-intent manual/hybrid marketing is the only way to get real high-ticket buyers?
Is AI making us lazy marketers who make less money, or am I just missing a secret master loop?
Drop your brutal thoughts below. Let’s discuss.

For me is clear that Ai can give more posibilities to grow your online business, but on the same side it takes a lot of effort to learn new tools.
With the ability to achieve more in a shorter preiod of time, it also takes more effort to go with the trend, bcause it`s changing so fast nowadays.

But for me, a person with technical background, it makes more good than bad, because the process of making some is speeded up significantly.

I would say its helping me at the moment. I used to get multiple ideas and their implementation is now easier than what it used to be before. So far my sales are steady so no effects. Helped a lot in cost cutting though.

Not printing money much on AI but learning a lot of things that looked too difficult earlier. It will pay off later for sure.

Not sure about blogs but for sales copies, AI is definitely the way to go