4 mistakes to avoid when using generative AI for content creation
Written by Cohere | 19th March 2025
Table of Contents
Over recent years, there have been huge advances in the field of AI-generated content. Access to technology that aids the content creation process has never been more widely available.
However, AI content creation has drawbacks, and if you’re not careful, you can become overly reliant on AI tools.
By the end of this guide, you’ll have the tools you need to create content that balances using generative AI while still keeping a human in the loop.
Generative AI
What is generative AI and how does it work? Generative AI is an AI tool that has been taught to process and respond to human language. Using these abilities, it is learning not just how to comprehend our communication content but to be a content creator itself.
4 mistakes to avoid when using generative AI for content creation
There are numerous mistakes that you need to steer clear of when using generative AI for content creation. Here are four of the most important things to consider:
1. Overlooking privacy
AI is great at coming up with material in a short amount of time. What used to be the result of hours of time and resources from professionals, can now be churned out in an instant.
This is great news for those facing a tight deadline. However, it is not so great when ethical considerations, such as privacy, are overlooked in a rush to produce content. For example, if an AI model has been trained on datasets that include personal information, such as medical data, it might provide answers that include personal details that shouldn’t be shared.
Privacy is a huge factor that you simply can’t afford to ignore. From a purely ethical standpoint, you need to prioritize it. And if that’s not weighty enough, there are also massive legal and potential financial consequences if you get privacy matters wrong. Legislation such as GDPR and CCPA stipulate that data used by AI tools must be stored and processed securely, and users must be informed how their data will be used.
So, don’t be left asking, “What is AI security?”. When your generative AI tool comes up with some data-filled and impressive-looking material, you need to spend time going through it. Make sure that nobody’s privacy has been compromised as a result of generative AI for content creation, which takes some sensitive data and gives it prominent exposure.
2. Poor visual translations
When creating digital content, you’ll often want image generation that accurately conveys what you’re writing about. However, there are many incidences of AI-powered tools coming up with something unsuitable for your purposes due to a lack of understanding of context.
This is getting better due to AI transformer models, which understand language by focusing on the relationships between words. Older models analyze sentences one word at a time, but transformer models analyze the whole sentence at once, which helps them understand the context better. However, the problem hasn’t gone away yet.
AI content creation tools still have a way to go and have been known to generate images that aren’t suited to the accompanying text. For example, the prompt “salmon in a river” went viral as AI created images of cuts of salmon fillets seemingly frolicking in a river.
Even worse, as a mixture of inappropriate, bizarre and even offensive images have been produced it’s easy to see why some are describing AI-generated art as impractical.
For these reasons and others, using an AI image generator requires you to carefully analyze your AI tool’s output to make sure it’s not off-topic.
You can also use a service like simpleshow.com to create a video that will resonate. The simpleshow motion tool examines your script and intuitively finds the right images to support your message.
3. Not checking facts
Perhaps one of the more surprising elements of AI content generators is their creativity with the truth. Yes, they can make stuff up. Why is this? It’s often because the priority of many AI systems is to satisfy the apparent requirements of the user.
This means that complete nonsense can come from using generative AI for content creation. There are increased reports of customer service and marketing chatbots issuing incorrect data to do with, say, company policy when sufficient information is unavailable.
As US cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter described in 2022, it’s possible to lead generative AI systems in all kinds of “hallucinations” (as the terminology has it). Through specific inputs, Hofstadter managed to get ChatGPT to assert that the Golden Gate Bridge was transported across Egypt in 2016.
The good news is that, since then, ChatGPT has shaped up its act, denying that the Golden Gate Bridge ever made such a journey. So things are improving. But be wary of mistakes nonetheless, particularly if you’re using AI platforms in enterprise or corporate settings where your professional reputation may be on the line.
Remember that the teams behind the models have their own agendas and biases. You can’t take for granted that their only aim is to increase access to information—they may have intentionally tweaked the training data to ensure the ‘approved truth’ is presented. For example, see what happens if you ask the new Chinese AI model Deepseek about Taiwan.
The lesson is: check those facts. Use reputable sources to cross-reference anything your AI buddy may confidently declare true.
4. Over-reliance
There’s a time-honored saying: moderation in all things.
AI-generated content can be amazing. It’s beyond anything most of us could have even dreamed of a few years ago. But one thing we’ve learned very quickly is that it’s not perfect.
That’s why articles like this one get written. And it’s why you shouldn’t use generative AI for content creation, to the exclusion of all other tools.
Human progress has always depended on cross-pollination of ideas. For this to happen, different ways of thinking and different systems have to be brought into contact with each other. This collaboration is what gives rise to new perspectives and fuels innovation.
In other words, using the same approach every time won’t necessarily produce the best results. This is true whether you’re creating academic pieces or just some fun social media content. We need (and love) variety, so by mixing things up, you will see your content perform better.
Get the balance right
So, don’t go all-in on AI. Some observations show that an over-dependence on AI has led to journeys ever further up the wrong path. There’s evidence, for instance, that generative AI is coming up with even more spectacularly bad imagery as it feeds off the mistakes made by other AI creators.
Again, it’s impossible to overstate how important it is not to depend wholly on your AI generative system. Use other sources of help, such as simpleshow.com, when making video content, and you’ll avoid those damaging errors. You’ll be confident of high-quality content, and you’ll not add to the misinformation mountain that continues to plague us all.
Author's bio
Cohere
Cohere is an AI platform that develops advanced AI models and products to address real-world business challenges. The company creates cloud-agnostic solutions.
