Quick background on my situation — any input appreciated.
using AI to generate marketing copy. I've been dealing with this for about 16 weeks now and the situation isn't improving.
This involves content I created over the past 6 months. I do have documentation proving my ownership and timeline.
Should I hire a lawyer for this or try to handle it myself?
Marketing director at a mid-size ecommerce company here. We have been using AI for marketing copy generation for about 18 months now and have done extensive legal review with our counsel on the IP implications. Let me share what we learned.
The biggest risk with AI-generated marketing copy is not actually copyright ownership (the US Copyright Office has generally held that purely AI-generated content lacks the human authorship required for registration). The bigger risk is that AI models can inadvertently reproduce copyrighted text from their training data. If your AI-generated copy closely mirrors someone else published content, you could face an infringement claim regardless of whether you intended to copy.
Our internal policy now requires three steps: First, all AI-generated copy goes through a plagiarism checker like Copyscape before publication. Second, a human editor must substantially modify and add creative direction to any AI output. This human involvement helps establish copyrightability. Third, we maintain records showing the human editorial process for each piece of content.
Also be careful about using AI to generate copy that references competitors, makes specific claims about product performance, or includes testimonials. The FTC holds advertisers responsible for the accuracy of their marketing claims regardless of whether a human or AI wrote them. AI tools can hallucinate statistics and fake endorsements that could trigger FTC enforcement actions.