Last week, I touched on AI and high tech approaches to content marketing as part of a report on trends. There wasn’t enough space to go into those trends in depth, so I decided to write a separate post. It turns out one post isn’t enough to cover all of them, either, so I’ll just start with AI.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and AI painting generators like DALL-E 2 are becoming more popular with content marketers because they produce content quickly and cheaply, and tell us what content will perform well for a given audience. As the technology has evolved, several legal and ethical issues have become important considerations for business owners. Here are some things to consider:
- Your audience and brand. Does your audience care if your content is written by a real person? If they don’t mind, and you plan to disclose the fact that your content is created by AI, using AI this way should not damage your brand. If your audience would be turned off by the use of AI, you shouldn’t be using it, especially without telling them. It’s never good when you’re lying to your customers because branding is all about trust. The key (as with all marketing) is to know your customers and deliver what they need.
- Your reason for using AI. You can use AI generated content for anything from giving your customers something pretty to look at while they wait for a page to load to faking pictures to influence how people vote in an election. One is usually ok while the other is completely unethical. You should examine your motivations (which are likely financial and somewhere between these extremes) and determine whether your purpose sits right with you.
- Your commitment to accuracy, honesty, and reality. If you’re publishing the work of an AI on your company website or social media accounts, you are essentially (and probably legally) taking responsibility for the information it contains. Problems arise because AI can be wrong by accident, intentionally misleading, and/or subject to human biases.
AI is not always right. You have no control over what sources AI uses for learning or what data it uses to support conclusions. Errors can range from low stakes (a word processing program underlines a spelling or grammar “mistake” that is actually correct) to high stakes (AI cites completely made up data from an extremist website). If you’re putting information out there, you need to be responsible for it. Depending on your business and audience, it may not matter much, or it could take more time and resources to fact check the AI than to conduct research and write content yourself.
AI is not neutral. Our technology has inherited society’s biases. The UNESCO website (article here) cites the disturbing example of using a search engine to search for “school girl” versus “school boy.” The results of the first tend to be highly sexualized while the latter tends to produce ordinary pictures of children. The search engine’s function is to deliver what the person searching wants to see rather than to produce an objective representation of the world. Because more people searching for “school girl” are looking for sexualized content than non-sexualized pictures of children, the search engine will continue to produce those pictures more. As horrifying as it is, as society sexualizes little girls, so will search engines. There is no technology that is not influenced by human behavior.
AI can be used to undermine reality. We’re living in weird times. People do not even agree about what is real anymore. Bots produce convincing pieces of disinformation and outright propaganda, from which humans and other AIs learn. In addition to persuasive written propaganda, visual deep fakes make it difficult to discern reality. Unsourced material becomes perceived as a credible source in itself due to the volume of postings and endorsements from more trusted sources. Media literacy is dropping while unprecedented new mediums emerge. Not having an agreed upon sense of reality may be one of the most significant dangers we face. It is important to be transparent about AI so that we do not contribute to this problem. - Your commitment to privacy. I talk here a lot about privacy concerns. I’m in love with data and I’m no Luddite, but the ethical and legal debates over data collection are not going away anytime soon. AI can undoubtedly use your data to analyze your audience and produce a content strategy that makes sense for your business, along with ideas for targeted content and the content itself. However, you should continue to monitor the legal battles about data collection so you don’t end up with lawsuits or fines that could destroy your business. Be transparent about how data is being collected, used, and stored. Respect your audience’s wishes about data collection even if doing so gives both your human and artificial marketing teammates less to work with.
- Your feelings about human creativity, the arts, and society. There are several issues surrounding AI’s effect on the arts, ranging from deeply philosophical questions about the human condition to practical matters of copyright infringement. AI learns how to make art and write creatively by using and analyzing the copyrighted work of human creators without compensation or acknowledgement. As AI takes more of the paid jobs available to creators, many artists resent having trained the AI for free so it can take their jobs. Some people fear that art and literature will be replaced entirely, or that owning something created by a human will become a status symbol afforded only the very rich, leaving few paid opportunities for creators. Still others argue that devaluing art and writing even more than they already are will result in a real diminishment of the human spirit and the death of creative thinking. They ask why we are having AI do the most human of tasks, freeing us up for more labor, when we could be having it do the most labor-intensive tasks, freeing us up to make more art. It’s important to consider these questions, and it’s also important to note that they aren’t just philosophical. On a practical level, issues of piracy, plagiarism, and exploitation probably will come before the courts eventually. Considering the fines people must currently pay for using unlicensed music and art assets, it is wise to make sure you aren’t doing anything that will bring you undue financial risk down the road.
- How AI Will Affect SEO. One of the main benefits of high-quality content is that it boosts your search. The jury is still out on whether search engines will detect and penalize AI generated content, but you will definitely get dinged for anything that feels like spam. You want to make sure that “generating a lot of content quickly” doesn’t have the exact opposite effect of what you want.
With this technology evolving so quickly, the debates are only to get more involved until we adapt to the tech. AI is undoubtedly here to stay. Every technology we’ve had has come with worries, benefits, and costs. It is unlikely that society will turn away from AI; we probably are all going to use it one way or another, and we will have to see where we land with a lot of these issues as things change. For now, it’s important to keep these ethical questions in mind to avoid any future legal issues and keep your customers happy with your brand.
Substance and Style 