AI for content: data, plagiarism, and ethics

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can generate blog posts, features, and other web content for you charity in seconds, and for very little or no cost. Such tools include Jasper and ChatGPT. The alternative is to get a writer to create the content, which can involve a significant outlay, and which is likely to take hours or, more probably, days.

So you might think that using an AI tool would be a no-brainer for your charity. But there are some very good reasons for caution before relying on an AI tool for your charity’s content.  

Not always true

The first thing to understand is that while a reputable AI tool will not deliberately lie or write misleading content, that doesn’t mean that everything it generates will be true or perfectly up front and frank. That’s because these tools get their information from sources on the internet, and not everything on the internet is completely true.  

That means that any information produced by an AI tool needs to be checked by a human to ensure that it is correct, and that data comes from a trustworthy source (and not, for example, from an organisation which may be publishing data selectively to further its own agenda).

Biased or unfair

Humans are also needed to check that the information produced by an AI tool is representative, fair, and unbiased. It may not be intentional, but if an AI tool uses algorithms which make it more likely to find or give weight to certain data sources rather than others, this can result in unintentional bias in the content it generates. This can be hard to detect, which is why oversight from someone with research or editing skills is required.

Authorship and plagiarism

This leads us to the second thing your charity needs to think about before using AI generated content: who is the content’s author?

That’s important because your charity is responsible for the content that it publishes. If an article on your website or a blog post supporting a fundraising event includes false or misleading information, it won’t be acceptable in the eyes of your charity’s supporters to try to excuse yourself on the grounds that the content was written by an AI.

There’s also the issue of plagiarism. Plagiarism is when an individual passes off someone else’s work or writing as their own. An AI tool, though not strictly a person, could certainly plagiarise part of another person’s work. If some of your charity’s content has been plagiarised then this could result in very negative publicity.

For both of these reasons, it’s important that a real person takes ownership of AI-generated content, so that if issues of inaccuracy or plagiarism arise then the buck stops with them.  

The human touch

Another problem with AI-generated content is precisely that it has been generated by an AI, and therefore lacks human emotion. While that is not important for purely factual content, it is unlikely to be suitable if you want to convey the emotional impact of your charity’s work, or to appeal to the emotions of readers to encourage them to donate to your cause.

Related to this is a lack of personalisation and branding. When trying to engage potential donors and supporters, branding and personalisation (along with emotional impact) are often key. But AI-generated content tends to be generic rather than crafted to press the right buttons in the readers’ minds.

Ethical considerations

One final thing to consider is the impact that the use of AI content generation tools may have humans. Is it ethical for your charity to replace human writers with AI-tools?

The good news is that this question is probably a straw man. Your charity should certainly use its resources as efficiently as possible, and if generating content using AI tools is more cost effective than paying a human then it makes financial sense. But as we have discussed, you still need humans to oversee AI tools, so humans will still have to be paid as part of the content production process.

The positive side to all of this is that your charity can allow AI tools do the low-level drudge work of finding and collating data and other facts and assembling a rudimentary article. This enables your staff or freelance writers to concentrate on the more “high level” aspects of content production such as crafting content with the right style, tone, and emotional appeal for the charity’s audience.

That means that far from causing an ethical dilemma for your charity, AI tools should allow humans to produce more and better content, while spending less time on the duller aspects of content generation that these tools excel at.