Guiding Principles for Generative AI Use

Generative AI and other AI-based tools are evolving rapidly and the conversation around AI continues to generate a variety of opinions. We will do our best to use AI tools in an ethical way that delivers the best results for our clients. This document, our perspective, and our policies may change, when they do we will do our best to articulate why and what our intention is moving forward. 

 

Our Perspective on AI

 

1. 1. Insight comes from experts. Not robots.
      We believe that content containing deep insight, interesting perspectives, and empathy cannot be effectively replicated by current AI technology. We will rely on human subject matter experts to drive our editorial decisions.

   2. It’s the artist that paints, not the brush
      AI tools are powerful and they can and should be used by writers, designers, and strategists to enhance their ability to deliver effectively for our clients, but the creative person chooses, rewrites, edits, and ultimately crafts the final output.

   3. Responsibility for the content resides in us.
      We know AI tools can (and often do) make mistakes and deliver poor results in terms of both form and facts. Responsibility relies with humans to ensure anything created with AI meets our standards of quality.

   4. AI has the opinions of the internet, and the internet is dumb.
      AI tools have been trained on the content of the internet and therefore carry many of the biases and errors found on the internet. We never assume that an AI tool has the “right” opinion.

   5. People want to connect to people
      People are intuitive and can sense when they are hearing from a real, good-faith human. AI is bad at humor, subtly, and empathy, so fully AI-generated content has limitations.

 

How we might use AI, and how we won’t use AI

1. We may use AI to generate ideas.
2. We may use AI to generate outlines.
3. We may use AI to generate small and large blocks of text, even full articles.
4. We may use AI to edit, rewrite, reframe, or otherwise modify text we write.
5. We may use AI to generate different opinions on a topic.
6. We will not use AI to determine the correct opinion on any topic.
7. We will not submit or publish AI-generated text straight from the source. 
8. All AI-generated text will be edited and refined by a writer. 
9. The person who uses AI to generate text is responsible for its accuracy and fact checking.
10. AI does not replace the role of a subject matter expert, editor, or creative in the process of creating content. 
11. We will not use AI tools to generate anything based on work artists or creatives created that they have not been adequately compensated for.

 

Legal Considerations

Current guidance from the US Copyright Office is that AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted. Therefore “made for hire” work is at risk of be indefensible from a legal perspective. As such, we will not use AI generated images, graphics, or writing without significant human editing for anything that a client would need to claim exclusive ownership of (logos, iconic images or graphics, thought-leadership content, etc).