While AI offers many benefits, it can also introduce new brand safety risks that didn't exist a few months ago. In this post, we'll cover five new ways generative AI can put your brand safety at risk and cover tips for how you can mitigate these risk.
What is AI Brand Safety?
AI brand safety is the practice of protecting a brand's reputation on the internet, specifically within content created by generative AI tools like Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude.
As AI generates content that mentions brands, it is crucial for brands to ensure that the content the AI creates does not harm the brand's image or reputation in any way.
The primary objective of AI brand safety is to ensure that AI-generated content always aligns with and upholds your brand's image, values, and reputation.
4 New Generative AI Brand Safety Risks To Watch Out for
Here are 4 example scenarios where new types of AI-generated content can cause brand safety risks:
AI-Driven Narrative Hijacking and Unintentional Advocacy
A brand uses generative AI to create social media content, news snippets, or even articles about its industry. Due to biases in the AI's training data or an overemphasis on trending keywords, the AI starts to subtly weave in narratives that align with extremist views, political agendas, or controversial social movements – entirely unintentionally on the brand's part.
For example, a sports brand's AI-generated content about team rivalries might start to incorporate language that fuels aggressive fan behavior or promotes a discriminatory "us vs them" mentality.
This is a new type of "narrative hijacking" brand safety risk that can begin to align your brand with unintended and potentially damaging ideologies and messaging.
Here's how to mitigate this.
To Reduce This Risk: Define a clear and comprehensive "brand voice" and "brand values" guidelines that you use to train the AI tools your team utilizes as an initial prompt. Then, meticulously audit AI-generated content for its tone, ideology, and alignment with your brand. From there, have your content teams follow a specific human-reviewed checklist to ensure everything generated aligns with your brand before it's posted on your site or social channels.
AI-Generated Product Reviews and "Deepfakes" Testimonials
Imagine an AI system generating positive product reviews for a brand and accidentally creating a highly convincing "deepfake" video testimonial of a fictional person raving about the product. This isn't just misinformation, it's a new level of deception. If discovered, the brand will face a huge backlash for fabricating customer endorsements and will lose trust and potentially face legal repercussions. The risk here isn't just an accidental fact-check failure, but a deliberate (albeit AI-driven) creation of a non-existent reality that impacts consumer perception and regulatory compliance.
Here is how to mitigate this.
To Reduce This Risk: To eliminate this risk, refer customers to the reviews on your website and implement a multi-layered verification process for all reviews you post online. These reviews should be reviewed by a teammate to spot any form of generated synthetic media or abnormalities.
For reviews on third-party websites, use feedback forms to submit reports of any AI-generated reviews that aren't from verified customers, especially those that appear to include generated pictures or videos of the products.
Algorithmic Association with Harmful or Inappropriate Content
A brand uses an AI-powered ad placement system that identifies audiences and optimal placements. However, due to unforeseen correlations in the AI's training data, the AI places the brand's ads next to user-generated content that is harmful to the brand's image., While this isn't the AI itself creating the harmful content, it's a new type of "ai driven proximity risk" where the AI's decision-making can lead to a highly damaging and unintended association.
Here's how to mitigate this.
To Reduce This Risk: Report any ad placements that do not align with your brand, demand placement transparency, and request brand safety controls from your ad platforms' reps.
It's crucial to closely monitor where your ads are running with third-party verification tools that can flag inappropriate placements in real-time.
Audit the AI's "learning" by reviewing its content associations and providing feedback to refine its understanding of safe and unsafe environments, especially for emerging forms of harmful content.
AI Chatbot Hallucinations and Misleading Customer Service
Chatbots run the risk of hallucinating information. This means they can fabricate details, policies or solutions that are completely wrong or even dangerous for your brand.
For example, a banking brand's chatbot might tell a customer about an incorrect withdrawal limit, and the customer follows that tip and then incurs a fee because it was incorrect from the start.
Worse yet, a health care brand's chatbot can give incorrect medical advice that leads to someone being put in a dangerous scenario that didn't need to be.
While chatbots are designed to be helpful and save time, a hallucination can lead to real world consequences and even create a PR nightmare.
Here's how to mitigate this.
To Reduce This Risk: Ground your AI chatbot's knowledge base in verified, up-to-date, and brand-approved information. Set up the proper parameters to restrict the chatbot from "freely generating" answers beyond the knowledge it has been trained on. If a question is asked beyond its scope, have the chatbot prompt with "I am unsure, but a member of our customer service team will be able to help you. Please contact us at (your customer service line)."
Additionally, it's important to clearly communicate that customers are speaking with an AI, and monitor chatbot conversations for any incorrect information and use this as direct feedback to retrain and refine the AI model.
The Future of AI Content and Brand Safety
AI-generated content offers many benefits, but it also comes with brand safety risks. By understanding these risks and the proactive steps to mitigate them, brands can protect their reputation online.
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