As a business owner who is constantly trying to create new content to fuel your marketing, you’re likely aware of the incredible potential of AI to streamline this time consuming process. However, it is really important to approach this new technology with an understanding of the potential copyright law implications. AI content generation tools can be a legal minefield and create significant risks of copyright infringement, if you are not utilizing the tool properly. It’s also essential to remember that the terms of use for many of these tools shifts the burden of copyright liability onto the end user- you.

 

Therefore, as a business owner, it is your responsibility to ensure that the content to publish does not violate the intellectual property rights of others. If you'd like to learn more about legal considerations when using AI-generated content, like who owns the rights to the content generated by AI and who is responsible for copyright infringement, read more in Part 1 of this series on AI-generated content. In this article, we will provide some dos and don'ts of using AI tools to create content for your business, so you can confidently use it as an effective tool in your business.

Don’t use AI content generation tools to:

 

• Write content that you publish as-is

AI content generation tools are language tools that pull information from across the internet. In doing so, they often plagiarize other people’s content and, if you publish the content, they pass the blame off to you in their terms of use. So, just don’t publish AI generated content. Use it for ideas or to flesh out an outline, but before you publish anything, make sure you have SUBSTANTIALLY reworded and reworked any AI generated content. Ideally, you will use these tools to spark ideas and get your own writing juices flowing.

 

• Conduct research

AI “facts” or “statistics” are not reliable. AI content generation tools have been none to make stuff up. So, do your own research. 

• Summarize or paraphrase content written by someone else

There is a great risk when using AI to summarize or paraphrase content that was written by someone else, that it will plagiarism or substantially copy that work in doing so, which is copyright infringement. If you publish AI content that violates someone else’s copyrights, you will be liable for copyright infringement.

• Produce all of your content ideas

Do not overly rely on AI to generate ideas - it will not generate any original ideas - those can only come from your unique human mind.

Do use AI content generation tools to:

• Help you brainstorm or overcome writer’s block

While you should not overly rely on AI to generate ideas, it can be a really useful tool to get your own wheels turning and move past writer’s block. Maybe you won’t use one of the AI ideas exactly, but it might lead you down the right path to arriving at your own original idea. 

• Summarize your own original work for a social media caption

AI is a language program, so if you’re going to use AI to summarize content, make sure it’s summarizing your original work to ensure that AI isn’t plagiarizing another work in it’s summary. You don’t want to publish any plagiarism! Keep in mind that the standard of copyright infringement is whether two works are substantially similar. They do not need to be word for word identical. 

• Convert a podcast or video transcript into a blog article

AI can be a really useful tool for converting a podcast or video transcript into a blog article, but make sure it’s YOUR podcast or video! Even if you are a guest on another podcast, the host of that podcast has rights to the episode script, so you need to get permission from them before converting the episode into a script that you will publish as your own blog article. 

If you have your own podcast or post a video on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube,  AI can help you save considerable time in repurposing content. However, you still need to be really careful about the prompt/instructions you provide and probably spend from time substantially rewording the AI generated content to the extent that it does not use the same phraseology that you used in your original audio Still, the AI converted podcast or video script can be really helpful providing you with an article framework that is much more reader-friendly than a podcast script. 

Here’s a quick look into how I use AI this way:

1. I upload my podcast audio into Happy Scribe to generate a transcription.
2. Then, I copy and paste the transcription into ChatGPT to instruct it to generate a blog article from the following podcast transcript using verbatim language.
3. I review the organization of the blog article and adjust it as needed. 
4. I review each section and go back to my transcription and copy and paste more verbatim language, whenever possible (I find that ChatGPT re-words it a bit too much). 
5. I reword any AI generated sentences that did not come directly from the podcast episode.

This might sound like a lot of extra work, but I want my blog article to be on brand and I don’t want it to be recognized by search engines as AI generated content and therefore, de-prioritized. Still, Happy Scribe and ChatGPT save me a SUBSTANTIAL amount of time by using them this way.

• Rephrase an awkward sentence

If you have a run-on sentence or need to find a proper synonym for an overused word, ChatGPT can serve as the extra brain power you need. This can be much more useful and expedient than using a thesaurus, because the AI can consider the full context of the sentence.

What happens if you use AI to generate content and are then accused of copyright infringement? Or if you find out that someone is stealing your original content (or publishing content that looks suspiciously similar to yours)? If you are experiencing a problem with copyright infringement, either because someone is copying your work without your permission or you yourself have been accused of copyright infringement, it’s time to speak with an experiencedcopyright lawyer. 

I welcome you tobook a complimentary consultation and look forward to speaking with you!