If you’re in the digital marketing business, you’re probably already overwhelmed with stories about AI and the fast-growing set of tools that can be used to generate content . Who needs to write anything anymore when we can simply paste a prompt into Chat GPT3?

Every marketer knows the pressure to generate more and fresher content. The press to get stuff out on all the feeds is real, and paying actual humans money is expensive over time. So, it makes sense why marketers would be curious about ways to deliver more content with less time, money and energy input. AI sounds awesome!

AI is, as of now, a tool like a hammer. It’s a powerful assist to human work. But, you can do a lot of damage with a hammer if you don’t use it well.

So, where are these AI engines getting trained to create all that content for your site or your emails?

The algorithms are getting pointed at the rest of the web, where gajillions of paragraphs are out there in the open, ready to be used as the template or input.

Get ready to see more and more articles like this one:  A Writer Used AI To Plagiarize Me. Now What? In this case, it’s an everyday person getting dragged into a sketchy Substack ploy. Someone wants to “get rich” on substack, but doesn’t want to do the work, so they’re using AI to generate the content for them. But, in this case the AI pretty much just plaigerized. Or, the writer did and blamed it on AI. Either way, worrisome.

This is going to happen to a brand soon, if it already hasn’t. Some brand will use AI to make an ad, and an author will claim copyright infringement.

Good marketers that are interested in building and maintaining equity will want to tread very, very carefully here.