By Tom Wozniak, Chief Operating Officer – published on Only Influencers on 10/01/24
Regardless of whether you are a believer that AI is going to revolutionize every industry for the better or a skeptic who sees AI as a threat to original content creation and a host of other ‘human’ roles, I think everyone agrees that AI is here to stay. In the email marketing arena, AI has already shown it can deliver value in a variety of ways, from content creation to testing strategy and performance analysis. But it’s in the content creation arena where the debates are most polarizing.
The topic of AI and content generation has come up on more than a few occasions on weekly OI Members Only Zoom Discussions, and Doug Morneau wrote about it in a recent article for the OI blog (Is Honesty the Best Policy? The Truth About AI Content Disclosure.) These conversations have tended to raise as many questions as clear-cut answers, as the landscape continues to shift. So, I wanted to take a stab at creating a framework for considering not only AI’s place in various types of content creation, but also where disclosure of that involvement is either more likely or less likely to be necessary. If nothing else, it may simply move the discussion forward, as definitive answers remain elusive.
Why Does Disclosure Matter?
This seems like a good place to start, just to set the foundation. Why are we all concerned about disclosure when it comes to AI in content creation?
Legal Requirements – Laws around AI are still very much in their infancy. Any that have been passed likely haven’t been challenged in court yet, to determine whether the requirements they define will hold up to legal scrutiny. Today, there may not be many established legal requirements around disclosure related to AI’s involvement in published or otherwise shared content generation. Still, it’s probably only a matter of time. So, while this may not be a necessity today, it will likely come into play in the years ahead. The open question is where the laws will draw a line after which disclosure is required.
Ethical Requirements – We don’t need legal regulation to know that there are ethical questions about using AI to create content and who gets to take credit for that content. You also don’t need to be an ethics expert to recognize that there are questions to consider if someone uses AI extensively in creating content and then publishes that work as their own authored content. But, even here, it’s not as straightforward as we might like. How much involvement does AI need to have in creating the content in order for disclosure to be ethically required? Spell-checking? Grammar review? Initial ideation? Creating a content outline? Revising content the author writes? Creating entire sections of content based on a prompt? These answers will vary depending on who you ask.
Good Business Practice and Transparency – How about just good business practices and general transparency? Is disclosing the involvement of AI in creating content something that should be looked at as a best practice by businesses? Again, the answer is probably ‘it depends’. It may depend on the type of content being created. Is it a standard marketing email or thought leadership content the company publishes as evidence of its knowledge of the industry? Those seem like two common but very different scenarios where disclosure might seem appropriate in one but perhaps unnecessary in the other.
A Few Different Kinds of Content and Possible Approaches to Disclosure
Authored/Byline Content – If an individual is putting their name on an article, white paper, story or book, the reader has a reasonable expectation that the named author actually wrote it. So, if AI was used beyond a minimal extent, and certainly if it is used extensively, this is a situation where disclosure seems to be in the public interest and lack of disclosure might even be considered deceptive. But again, where do we draw that line of involvement?
Contracted Content – How about if you are a marketing consultant or agency contracted by a client to write content for them. If it isn’t detailed in the agreement, it might be reasonable for the client to assume a professional copywriter is creating the content. But, if the agency is using an AI chatbot to write the content, that might need to be disclosed in the contract. In some instances, non-disclosure could represent a breach of contract. So, at the very least, in a situation where content creation is being contracted, the use or non-use of AI should likely be described in the agreement.
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Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications as the COO for OPTIZMO Technologies.