We have been watching with amazement the speed at which generative AI has developed and affected so many areas of our lives and our work.

While AI has enormous potential to make our working lives easier, it also raises serious questions about how – or if – we use it as a content agency.

At Collective Content we have a forum of editors and team members that follows the latest developments in AI in the news and in academic research. This team meets weekly to talk about how we can agree on the appropriate, responsible and ethical use of AI in our work.

No doubt this position will evolve as the technology does but this is our current thinking on the subject of AI and content marketing.

Content creation

Our position is that we will not use any AI technology to create content for our clients. This includes copy for outlines and assets, as well as for documents such as content strategies and social copy.

Generative AI relies on so-called large language models that crawl the internet for data and therefore uses pre-existing content to generate answers to questions. This means that content generated by AI has a reasonable likelihood to include copyrighted material – potentially even from a client’s competitor.

Naturally, as writers we are proud of the quality, authenticity and accuracy of what we produce for clients. We believe the use of AI for content creation compromises that position.

Ideation and research

We’re open to using new tools and technology to help in the research and ideation stages of client work. But again, we advise our editors to tread with care.

Our editors have personal experience about how AI ‘hallucinates’ – in other words, how it makes up ‘facts’ where convenient truths do not exist. Therefore, while we encourage our writers to experiment with AI around ideation and research, we insist they always verify data and information sources independently to ensure they exist and are accurate.

Nothing generated by AI is copied into client assets. Nor do we input any sensitive/confidential client information into an AI tool for research or ideation.

With many former journalists on our writing roster, we’ve spent many years interviewing experts and there’s no substitute for a human-to-human conversation. Face-to-face conversations (even if over Zoom) will carry added weight as other sources of content become harder to validate as being real.

AI and content marketing

The pace at which AI is developing is incredible and many professions will see opportunities and threats alike. While AI can do many things that human writers cannot, at this point it can’t write with authenticity, originality and the specificity to client briefs and brand guidelines that we know our writers can.

No AI was used in the creation of this content.