Our AI content policy

March 14, 2023

At One Generation, we see AI as a tool and an opportunity. But it’s one we should all approach carefully.

On one hand, AI writers can help companies scale their content production dramatically. In some cases, AI can improve the quality of life of creatives.

On the other, AI is not helpful for all types of content. And for many reasons, AI-generated content should never be simply “copied and pasted” onto a site without a human editor’s touch.

Any company that plans to use AI regularly for content creation should have guidelines in place for when and how to use it. This piece summarizes our own thinking about AI and our internal guidelines at our agency.

The comments below apply specifically to written content, since we don’t yet offer design services to clients. We will update the guidelines if and when we expand our services.

Improved quality of life of creatives

As creatives ourselves, we know all too well the grunt work that goes into creating long-form content, and/or content at a high volume. Quality content (especially long-form SEO content) requires multiple drafts and many hours of work.

With AI writers now able to draft many types of content in minutes, this frees up creative energy for more valuable activities.

Human writers can focus more on strategy, adding value to the AI-generated content, and crafting unique content AI cannot yet replicate.

In our experience, this can translate to improved quality of life for creative professionals. It allows us to focus on the more creative and high-value aspects of our work — not just producing words on the page.

This may be an idealist view of the situation – but hey, we’re an optimistic bunch.

Competitive advantage over time

It also seems likely that, in the long run, companies that understand how to use AI will have a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

Like any other technology or software which allows a company to scale its marketing activities, early experimentation and adoption can make a huge difference over years and decades.

Since our clients come to us for advice on how to grow their businesses through content marketing, we’ve begun using AI so we can provide the best return and information to our clients.

What we use AI for

With the above in mind, we need to understand that AI writers are a good fit for some types of content, but not all.

At One Generation, we have begun experimenting with AI to help us create:

  • How-to guides and tutorials
  • Informational and support-style content
  • Shorter, supportive copy, such as metadata (titles, descriptions) and social posts

We never simply copy and paste AI content without taking it through our editorial process described later in this piece. That would be an irresponsible and lazy use of AI. (And not a service to our clients or their audience.)

What we don’t use AI for

Although AI can help with more informational types of content, we haven’t yet found AI to be able to reliably generate other types of content.

This is especially relevant for our niche of purpose-driven businesses since they need more highly niched content than the average business.

Types of content AI cannot typically create include:

  • Highly niched or expert-level content
  • Articles about personal experience or original research
  • Content about proprietary processes or terms a company has invented
  • Thought leadership content

We will continue experimenting with AI in these cases, but in many cases a human will need to write or heavily edit these more advanced types of content.

Our editorial process for AI content

All content we create goes through a rigorous editorial process, and this is even more true for AI-generated content.

With every piece of AI-generated content, we take the following steps:

  • Plagiarism and AI detection check
  • Writing quality edit
  • Fact check
  • Brand and originality edit
  • Conversion optimization edit

These steps help ensure that each piece of content is ethically created, reads well, is appropriate for the brand, and will perform well in search and lead generation.

“Will you use AI for my project?”

The short answer is that if we think AI will help us get a client better results in a shorter period of time – yes, we will use it.

The longer answer is that it depends on the client’s existing body of content, their brand voice and guidelines, the type of content they need to create, and their marketing goals.

For instance, if a company mainly needs traffic for their site and doesn’t yet have any optimized how-to guides for their audience, we might want to create them — AI can probably help us do this.

If, on the other hand, a company already has high traffic and a large body of SEO content, we might focus more on thought leadership and sales enablement content, in which case AI may not be as relevant.

While the “how” is important, we first must understand “what” we’re trying to accomplish.

Questions? Let’s chat!

No doubt, we will evolve this policy as AI changes and we continue to discover the best use cases for AI.

If you’re a prospective or current client and have questions or concerns about our use of AI, we’d be happy to chat. Reach out us at hello@onegenerationseo.com.

If you’d like to talk about a potential project, you can book a call with our team.