You Ask, I Answer: Why Have Content Statements?

In today's episode, Rebecca asks, why do you have content statements, content authenticity statements in your newsletter? This is a really good question because very few people are doing it, and it probably looks a little bit strange. The reason for it is twofold. One, transparency is the currency of trust. I've said this since 2007.

The more transparent you are, the more trustworthy you are because people it invariably understand if you're sharing something and explaining something about what you're doing, you come across as not hiding anything, right? And you can decide for yourself how comfortable you are with that. Um it's especially important when the numbers change, right? Some weeks, it's a hundred percent of the newsletter is mine. Some weeks, 25% of it is mine.

Um, that was not in some way manipulated by AI. And so those content authenticity statements help people understand really the outputs and what we're doing with them. The second thing, uh, the second reason that you should do this is legal. The legal reason. Uh and Sharon Torek, who I saw at the marketing AI conference this past uh this past August or July, confirmed this in her session about uh the laws around generative AI.

Fundamentally, if you want to exert a copyright claim, you have to disclaim things that are not yours, right? So if you uh she was saying if you do a collaboration with somebody and you write the book and they do the art, you must disclaim the art because you didn't do it, but somebody else did. So that copyright for that art is held by that person. Machines cannot hold copyright. AI cannot claim copyright on anything.

Copyright is exclusively the domain of humans. So in my newsletters, part of the content authenticity statement is disclaiming the things that are not mine. And that literally means not claiming the things that a machine did, which reinforces the rest of my claims. It reinforces what I can claim as mine, what I can exert copyright uh protection over, what I could sue someone for if they violated my intellectual property rights. If you don't have authenticity statements about your content, then the burden of proof is on you to say, well, this I made, this I did not make.

Now, it may be simple to do, or it might be enormously complicated depending on your organization. If you get in the habit of having those content authenticity statements, then it becomes very clear what you are essentially laying claim to. If I say 95% of the newsletter is made by me, the human, I am effectively saying 95% of this newsletter is copyrighted to me, and therefore you can't reuse it, right? Because legally you can reuse something generated by a machine because there is no copyright attached to it. And so exerting your copyright claims is easier if you have been disclosing all along what is and is not machine generated.

So that's the other reason I do it. Transparency and enforceability of copyright. Whether or not you choose to do this in your own publications, that is up to you. I'm not saying there's a right way or a wrong way. I'm saying there's the way that I'm tackling it.

And it's up to you and the qualified legal professionals that you work with to decide what the best approach is for you. I am not a lawyer. I don't even play one on social media. Um I cannot give legal advice that's worth anything. So talk to your legal team about what makes the most sense for you.

But consider that disclosure and claiming what is yours and disclaiming what is not yours is not a bad strategy just in general. It is not a bad strategy because it helps you reinforce your claims. So that's the show for today. Thank you for your question, and I'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.