You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 4: Marketing

In today’s episode, we’re diving into the challenging world of marketing without relying on AI-powered tools, and how to protect your content from being used to train these very systems. You’ll learn why relying on self-hosted platforms and exploring non-digital advertising avenues are crucial for maintaining data privacy in your marketing efforts. I’ll also reveal powerful content protection strategies, including visible watermarking, metadata standards, and even creating “canary traps” to track the unauthorized use of your work. Tune in to discover how to navigate the ethical considerations and practical implications of saying “no” to AI in your marketing strategy.

You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 4: Marketing

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Christopher Penn: This is part four in our series on how to avoid generative AI altogether. My friend and colleague Mar asked, “How do I avoid generative AI? Particularly, how do I protect my data? How do I not use this stuff?”

It’s getting complicated because more and more vendors are seeing the marketing impact of saying, “Hey, we’ve got AI in our product.”

In part one, we talked about legal stuff. In part two, we talked about infrastructure. In part three, we talked about software. In part four, this part, we’re going to talk about marketing and content protection.

Number one, you need to move to self-hosted marketing platforms: things like the Matomo, the Mautic system—anything that is open-source that you host on your hardware is the way you want to go. You cannot use SaaS-based services for the most part. No matter if it’s HubSpot, or Salesforce, or whoever—everyone and their cousin is building AI into their software.

In their terms of service, there’s licensing that says they may or may not be able to use this for derivative works. As I said in part three, just because a vendor today says, “We’re not using AI,” they are one acquisition away—one new private equity [investment] away—from saying, “Hey, we need to monetize everything. Let’s sell all the data.” Only if you own the infrastructure can you prevent that from happening.

Number two: average advertising has moved to AI. AI is showing up everywhere: “Generate some ad copy! Generate some images! Do this with generative AI!”

The only place you can be sure that people are not using your data to train—at least not at scale—is in non-digital advertising, advertising in the physical world. Things like billboards, bus wraps, direct mail in the customer’s physical mailbox, flyers, inserts in bank statements, pizza boxes—you name it. If there’s a non-digital solution, it is much harder and more costly for anyone to get data from the physical world into the digital world, compared to digital stuff. Non-digital advertising is a way you could market your company and not have to use—or have your data be exposed to—generative AI easily.

You will want to patronize services, apps, networks—whatever—that specifically prohibit AI. There are some—there’s one called Kara, I think that’s the name—but there are apps and ecosystems that are starting to pop up where people are like, “Yeah, we don’t want AI here.” When you see those places, that is a place for you to support, to invest in, and possibly to market in.

Generally speaking, if a company has an AI offering, you should not do business with that company. Avoid using any services from Google. Avoid using any services by Meta. Avoid using any services by Apple. You name it: if the company has an AI offering, you probably don’t want to be using their services, which—again—makes life very difficult as a digital citizen trying to avoid these things. That’s what we talked about in part three, about ad blockers and stuff cranked up to the max. It’s hard to totally prohibit having your data collected, but there are options for doing that.

There are some things you just can’t use. Google, in particular, you just cannot use Google services, period.

When it comes to protecting content, you want to make sure that your legal team (which we talked about in part one) has ammunition and can say, “Hey, we specifically said you can’t use AI.” If you see someone using your content with AI, you have grounds to stand on because you’ve made it very clear: you can’t use AI.

That means when you publish stuff online, you’ve got to block it and put CAPTCHAs up on everything. Your website is basically going to be a CAPTCHA page, which will not do good things for your SEO, but, in doing so, it prohibits crawlers from taking your content because everything’s got a CAPTCHA on it.

You need to visibly or audibly watermark all your creations. Anything that is yours: you have a watermark on it that has your brand name on it and says “AI use prohibited.” It can’t just be your watermark. It has to be “AI use prohibited” on everything you create.

There are metadata standards, like C2PA, that allow you to add metadata to content as well that says, “Here’s where this content came from,” and certifying that it’s free of AI. But you need the visible stuff, too. It says, “AI use prohibited.” Your lawyers need to be able to point to an example and say, “Hey, this person—big letters at the bottom of the video—’AI use prohibited’, and here it is inside your training data. You are violating this person’s intellectual property rights.”

The same way you can put a copyright notice on your content, you, as an owner of intellectual property, have the right to say what your content can and can’t be used for—whether someone honors it is another story, and that’s why you need a lawyer to enforce that.

But if you do that, then—if you label everything—you’ll have a much stronger position because no one can claim ignorance. No one can claim, “Huh, that big, bright set of letters at the bottom of the screen? I didn’t know what that meant when it said ‘no AI use’.”

You want to also put canary traps in everything. Canary traps are unique things in your content that, if they show up somewhere else, could have only come from you.

A simple example: a lot of image generation tools, in early versions, you could say, “Create a Getty Images watermark,” and they would create a Getty Images watermark. Getty Images was like, “If you hadn’t used our data to train, it wouldn’t know how to do that. It is replicating our watermark perfectly. It means you used our data without our permission.” That lawsuit is pending.

If you embed unique text strings in your blog posts—like “zxz7312AYM,” or something—then, when you query it, search for it, or whatever, if it shows up in any search results or in any generative AI tool, you know where it came from, because it could not have come from somewhere else. Only you would have been doing something like that.

You even need to do things like watch your email list. There are services—there’s one called Listery—where they subscribe to every newsletter they can find, and then, when that newsletter gets emailed to them, they put it up on the web. You need to block them. When you’re managing your email subscriptions, [look for] people who are subscribed to your email newsletter—you’ve got to get rid of them. You’ve got to block that domain. “You may not subscribe to this newsletter.”

That’s a lot of the marketing and content protection. As you can see, it’s a lot of work. It is a lot of effort, saying no to generative AI, and being serious about it substantially harms your marketing. There are entire categories of things you can no longer do.

You can no longer do SEO, because Google has a monopoly on search, and Google is using generative AI everywhere. You can’t do SEO. You can’t have a website that’s optimized for search, because you are prohibiting search engines from finding it. If it ends up in Google’s search catalog, of course, it’s going to end up in Google’s training data set as well.

So in the last section, we’ll talk about what all this means, how to do due diligence, and some things to think about. Stay tuned.

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You Ask, I Answer: Avoiding Generative AI, Part 4: Marketing

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