The Rise of AI Content Generation Stirs Brand Reputation Fears

A new wave of language-based artificial intelligence is offering brands novel ways to automate and augment creativity. But the threats that a flood of synthetic content online, in areas like marketing communications and brand safety, have marketers vexed. For marketers, threats include surges of fake reviews, coordinated campaigns of misinformation on social channels or the brand safety risk of ads appearing alongside malicious fake news generated at scale. Reputational management has already become a growing need for brands as media fragmentation and the rise of the creator economy have created new fronts in monitoring brand safety, said Gartner analyst Chris Ross. "It’s going to make it a lot easier for people to create content," said Ross. "If you are someone that is concerned about reputation management and the authenticity of content, there's going to be a much, much larger body of content that you're going to have to wade through." Gartner predicts that 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated by AI within the next two years. It also projects that four in five enterprise marketers will have established content authenticity functions to protect against misinformation and other harmful fake material by 2027. Marketers Brace for an AI Arms Race in Search The marketing industry is far from alone in grappling with this problem. Schools are already trying to block students from cheating on classwork with ChatGPT, science journals have banned the system from being listed as an author and publisher CNET has faced backlash for accidentally generating fake news with it. OpenAI, the research group behind ChatGPT, recently responded with a tool designed to distinguish human-created content from that produced by AI. But it warns that the detector is “not fully reliable,” and journalists and experts who’ve interacted with it have found that to be a possible understatement. "It's going to become a much bigger job–this much larger volume and velocity of content to keep track of and to manage," Ross said. Brands band together Andy Parsons, senior director of the Content Authenticity Initiative at Adobe, said the company was already considering the nascent threat of AI-generated fake content in 2019 when it joined with a host of brands, tech companies and media outlets to form the Content Authenticity Initiative. The coalition’s goals include developing technical standards and tools to distinguish between real and fake content. "We anticipated a future of incredibly powerful AI tools, which is why we launched the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI) in 2019 to increase trust and transparency online and help combat misinformation through provenance, which describes the origins of a piece of digital content," Parsons said in an email. There will be a massive influx of mediocre content, specifically in the marketing space.Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of marketing platform Wistia While much of the organization’s work thus far has been focused on combating fake audio, video and imagery, Parsons said the organization’s more than 900 members are now beginning to discuss how to address written content as well. "As generative AI continues to transform everything from how creators make art to how people develop written content, the ability to see how content was created is more important than ever," he said. The potential for self-sabotage In addition to outside actors spreading misinformation, marketers also need to worry about their own potential to put out brand-damaging content as the process of content generation becomes more automated. Ross brought up the example of KFC’s German arm sending out a promotion based on a holocaust reference in November 2022, which it blamed on an automated system within the company. "There's a risk with such a high volume of synthetic messages that we're anticipating that brands may actually be doing it to themselves inadvertently," Ross said. With AI-based Custom Algorithms, Marketers Wring More Value From the Open Web Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of marketing platform Wistia, said that brands can protect against this problem by ensuring that systems are in place to carefully review each marketing message sent out by a brand for tone and accuracy. "As these applications become more mainstream, there will be a massive influx of mediocre content, specifically in the marketing space,” Savage said. “Marketers might rely on the tool to develop pieces of content without reviewing it first or making sure it aligns with the brand’s voice."

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The Rise of AI Content Generation Stirs Brand Reputation Fears

Gartner predicts 80% of marketers will deal with content authenticity issues by 2027

Patrick Kulp

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Patrick Kulp