Artificial Intelligence vs. Authentic Intelligence: Generative AI and Your Content Strategy

In May, several newspapers including the Chicago Sun-Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer published a syndicated summer reading list called “Heat Index: Your Guide to the Best of Summer” including upcoming releases from popular authors like Andy Weir, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Delia Owens. But there was a problem: Out of the 15 books listed, 10 of them did not exist. The upcoming titles from bestselling writers? Those weren’t real books.

The article had been generated using artificial intelligence. And while a fact-checker doing their due diligence may have caught the fictitious titles, the embarrassing incident demonstrated one of the worst-case scenarios possible when using AI to generate content.

With broad consumer availability of generative AI features, it’s easy to see how AI can help with developing content for your publication, and how it might save you time you could devote to other critical tasks in your association.

That’s why being an informed consumer and having awareness of software’s potential downsides can help ensure a timesaver doesn’t become a major headache.

Let’s take a look at how generative AI works, how associations and nonprofits use it, and what to keep in mind when incorporating it into your content strategy.

How AI Works

ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots are large language models, or LLMs. In simple terms, these programs are fed huge datasets, learn to identify patterns, and are able to use that knowledge to turn your input, or prompt, into an output. That output can take on many forms depending on the software tool, including text, images, and even audio and video. The chatbots also refine their output over time. If you’ve ever used a website’s customer support chat feature, or read a search engine’s topic summary, you’ve interacted with this type of model.

Industry-specific programs are trained on more specialized knowledge, allowing the technology to be used in contexts such as medicine, science, construction, finances and more.

As an association professional, you might use AI to:

Closed caption and transcribe meetings and create summaries
Automate membership data workflows
Brainstorm marketing ideas for events
Manage events, including assisting attendees through chatbots and analyzing data
Suggest rewrites to newsletters
Draft emails
Outline or write articles for your publication

Avoiding Content Pitfalls

When generating content using AI, what could go wrong? As the example of the summer book list shows, one potential problem with AI use is the tendency of large language models to just make stuff up, even when you ask it to cite sources. This is known as AI hallucination.

Essentially, a large language model’s pattern recognition might go off kilter, finding connections that a reasonable human wouldn’t make and generating outputs based on those faulty perceptions. AI might correctly answer part of a question while incorrectly extending that assumption to the other part of the question, or give dangerous advice with seemingly no rhyme or reason. AI might save you time in the writing, but you might use that time anyway on fact-checking and rewriting to make stilted text sound better, or just figuring out the right way to word a prompt. It may also get you in hot water by generating offensive content. As AI is trained on datasets created by human beings, it’s not impartial and can perpetuate bias and misinformation.

When it comes to image generation, AI’s shortcomings are more evident. AI-generated images may include garbled background text, nonsensical architecture or hands with the wrong number of fingers — or in the case of the AI-generated influencer at Wimbledon, two knees on one leg. If you use AI-generated content that has a factual error or a visual oopsie, it can cause people engaging with your content to become distrustful of it.

Along with the potential to harm your credibility or just look silly, AI use poses several ethical considerations to keep in mind when using it to generate content.

Ethics and Impacts

One major and ongoing debate about generative AI surrounds the data that’s used to train it. The datasets commonly used by AI come from copyrighted works. When you use an image generation tool, it’s essentially scraping images and artwork created by human beings and parroting it — without their permission and without compensating them, and sometimes against their stated desires and principles. Authors are increasingly adding disclaimers forbidding AI models to train on their work after revelations that their copyrighted materials have been used without their consent to train platforms like Meta.

Because this is a newer area of the law, the question about whether these cases constitute “fair use” is still being disputed. But since copyright ultimately belongs to human beings, using AI to generate content might mean you don’t hold the copyright to it.

How Innovative Publishing Can Help

Our goal at Innovative is to make your life easier. We know that managing your association’s work takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort, making tools like generative AI that offer to make you more productive in less time incredibly appealing.

If you’ve used generative AI to craft your content, let your editorial project coordinator know the specific ways that tool was used. Our proofreading process is rigorous and leads the industry. All of your content goes through multiple rounds of proofreading before it gets back to you. If you let us know when you’re using AI content, we can better assist you to avoid potential pitfalls.

There are many other ways Innovative can help you curate and perfect your content. Our team of writers, editorial project coordinators and designers can help with the following:

Brainstorming and developing article ideas – Whether you have just a general theme or a more detailed outline for a feature article, your editorial project coordinator can help you flesh out your ideas, identifying the most compelling angle and thoroughly researching the topic. If generative AI is part of your ideation phase, Innovative can step into that role or help you take that early chatbot brainstorming to the next level.
Developing editorial plans – Plan out your next issue or an entire volume in one go so you can cross it off your to-do list! Our team can develop an editorial plan with specific article topics for your review. Once we have your approval on the plan, we can assign writers and manage deadlines, so all you have to do is review the finished articles.
Interviewing sources – We have a team of professional staff writers who can reach out to any industry sources you’d like interviewed for an article.
Curating general interest articles – Are you struggling to find one more article to finish out your content? We can help with that. We have a vast resource of general interest articles that could be a fit, including those with a focus on a specific industry. These articles can be updated with quotes, updated data and region-specific callouts.
Creating infographics and using vector illustrations – You might use AI image tools to create a mockup of what you’re visualizing for a specific graphic. Sometimes that’s much easier than trying to describe it in just words. Our designers can take your mockup and re-create it to fit your publication’s branding. And don’t worry about finding images to illustrate your content. Our designers have access to a vast library of stock photography, so you don’t have licensing concerns for high-quality images. If you have a specific idea for the type of image you’d like to see paired with an article, let us know and we can take care of the rest.
Punching up your writing – ChatGPT is super useful for adding flair and polish to a piece of writing, and so is your Innovative team! Our standard proofreading process preserves the writer’s voice, but if you wrote something that you’d like stylistic suggestions on, just let your editorial project coordinator know. We make all suggestions using tracked changes, so you can always have the final say on how your work is presented.
Branding development – With the ongoing copyright questions around generative AI, it’s safer to avoid it when rebranding your association’s visual identity. Innovative’s designers can step in to consult on or completely redesign your brand identity, from logos to marketing materials.

Final Thoughts

Keeping up with new technology is crucial for busy associations, but the learning curve around best practices can feel overwhelming. Innovative aims to empower our clients to make the best choices on how AI fits into your content strategy. Your Innovative team is always here to help.

If there’s a service you need that isn’t currently part of our partnership, just let us know! Reach out to your editorial project coordinator or your business development representative. You can also reach out directly to CEO and Owner Aran Jackson at aran@innovativepublishing.com. We’re all about bringing that personal touch and authentic intelligence to our work so that it makes your work easier.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/summer-reading-ai-generated-titles-chicago-sun-times

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/ai-101/how-does-generative-ai-work

https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/specialized-data-could-improve-ai

https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/ai-hallucinations

https://www.datacamp.com/blog/ai-hallucination