At the November 16, 2023 ProVisors joint meeting of the Family Business Affinity Group and Transactions and Transitions Affinity Group, we heard a presentation given by Morvareed Salehpour, a business and tech lawyer here in Los Angeles. In her talk, she presented some of the looming questions that are enveloping the creative and legal industry. Being that AI-generated-content was a key issue in the writer’s strike, and given that I have been a writer of business content as well as a journalist for more than 30 years, I was very interested in hearing her thoughts.
Attorney Salehpour pointed out some of the privacy and confidentiality issues that AI- generated-content brings to the forefront. As we know, the ownership of data is crucial to a company and that data obviously needs to be protected. But how can data, that a writer has spent days or possibly weeks writing, be protected when data input platforms such as ChatGPT can breach confidentiality concerns that a human being would know not to touch?
As IP Attorney Todd Serota put it, “ChatGPT is an IP minefield. It has access to the entire internet but smart as it is, it doesn’t understand what is IP-protected content, and the user has no idea what source materials ChatGPT used.”
Further, Attorney Salehpour stated, “As more and more data is fed into AI platforms/algorithms, the resulting output becomes part of the collective data used to train and create further outputs.”
This means that any content that is shared publicly, on your website for instance, can be repurposed through AI on your competitors’ social media platforms if they – or the marketing team they hire – is using AI to generate their content.
As a writer, I feel very strongly about creating original content for my clients. I do not use Al to generate any content that I write and I don’t feel that it is ethical to do so. It’s like selling you someone else’s content and rebranding it as your own – it’s not right.
I, and many other writers, are truly concerned about our creative content being stolen and the very art of original writing being lost or replaced by AI platforms that produce an inferior work product. In the early days of my writing for public relations agencies, we called those who wrote cliché ad content “hacks.”
With AI, I am now seeing an increase in the number of “hack agencies” who will not think twice about cheapening their work product and laying off writers, replacing them with AI-generated-content to make a greater profit without actually doing any writing.
Writing is an art form that takes many years to develop. It’s not as easy as cutting and pasting sentences together but rather, it is about capturing the spirit of the person or firm who is being described and then creating an image of them that reflects their expertise.
Writing from a basis of knowing someone, meeting them, speaking with them, and creating a platform of content that is based on them – and them alone – is not something that you can get from an AI work product. If you are looking for content that is unique and customized to you and your company, ask who your agency’s writers are and don’t accept less than what you are paying for.