Don’t lie. You’re not thinking that policies are sexy.

But we’re kind of making a big thing about the latest version of our AI policy, aimed mainly at our writers, whether staff or freelancers.

Lots of other entities are at this point too – not just those professionally in content such as media companies or agencies, but all kinds of companies using GenAI. And rightly so.

This post is part of a series on being responsible about using GenAI. But the focus here is how we crafted our policy — and how that differs, on a personal level, from creating policies I was involved in earlier in my career.

2009 – (wasn’t) a very fine year

Rewind 15 years and I was an editorial director at the UK arm of a big media company. Great job, great place. Also – Great Recession. Times were tough.

On top of all the structural pressure was the rise of social media, with networks either relatively new or supercharged by everyone now having them as apps on these new gadgets called smartphones.

I was charged with creating our UK business’ social media policy. I worked with departments such as legal and HR, against a backdrop of a company packed full of journalists needing to be on these platforms. (As individuals? Employees? Both?)

I can’t post it here, but we ended up with something thoughtful and full of examples.

At the time, the Guardian had received cheers and jeers for its very brief social media policy. Basically it told staffers to be sensible. I wish I’d been the person drafting that one.

On the opposite side, I was at some dinner one night and an editorial lead at the AP asked me about the whole social media policy topic, then asked if he could just buy ours. I laughed and thought he wasn’t serious. But later I realise he very much was.

My main memory was of huge amounts of collaboration and uncertainty over where social was heading – and the attendant risk for employer and employees.

2024 — GenAI policy

Fast forward 15 years, now at agency Collective Content, and we first put together a policy for all our staff – especially our writers – last year, well into the GenAI revolution. Our blog post about it still ranks right up there on Google.

But the big update to our policy — our v2.0 — has felt like a very different process to how all the policy-making panned out 15 years ago (or further back, for other policies I’d seen crafted).

For one thing, this has been a true team effort, by our AI Working Group of content pros who know a lot about AI from working with tech companies going back 20, even 30, years, and from closely tracking the rise of GenAI over the past two years.

Unlike the social media policy from the late noughties, this process felt less like an exercise in politics and risk aversion. Leading in GenAI is much more about making sense of what is and isn’t possible, and supporting our clients. Being open, and even vulnerable, about what we don’t know isn’t seen as a bad thing, these days.

And unlike the news agency conversation above, we’ve also made a decision to open source our policy (no £££, sadly). If it helps other agencies and companies, that benefits everyone. And it can’t make us look bad, frankly.

What do you think? Are policies just a lot of handwringing? Or a necessary step in us understanding and harnessing an important technology?

See our full AI policy here. Let us know if you’d like to use it.