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How iDX Views Generative AI and Digital Waste 

September 19, 2023 | by Stefan Bardega 
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Discover how iDX addresses the challenges of digital waste and generative AI's impact on content creation.

At iDX, we’ve been talking a lot about a serious problem: digital waste. Our recently conducted survey with Forrester shows that businesses are struggling to contain digital waste resulting from a proliferation of MarTech platforms inside the enterprise. In fact, we found that 47% of marketing professionals believe that mismanagement of MarTech platforms leads to wasted resources and funds, escalating the digital overflow, increased power use, and elevated carbon emissions. Now, consider another emerging threat that will make digital waste even worse: generative AI. 

Every business I know is embracing generative AI to create more content. Why? Because it’s easy to prompt a tool like ChatGPT to crank out a blog post, press release, or any other type of content. Voila! The results appear within seconds. But generative AI doesn't always translate to superior outcomes. Indeed, its rise might exacerbate the issue of digital clutter. A Wall Street Journal article recently shed light on how generative AI’s advent has led to a surge in irrelevant article suggestions submitted to publications by PR and content marketing experts, evolving into a blizzard of spam. The report mentions numerous examples of AI-created content overwhelming news platforms and social media. 

To illustrate, in the beginning of May, NewsGuard (a news website evaluator) identified 49 AI-powered fake news portals, as per The Wall Street Journal. By June's end, this number had soared to 277. Generative AI expedites content production, leading to added wastage.  

This influx of AI content isn't just irksome – it’s an environmental hazard. To put it into perspective, the internet's total carbon impact exceeds that of the airline sector.  

Being major users of generative AI, marketers should take the lead in fighting waste. For instance: 

  • Generative AI enables brands to provide a tailored contact experiences for consumers. By analyzing browsing habits, purchase history, and other online interactions, AI systems can customize content, advertisements, and product recommendations for individual users. This means less wasteful content. 
  • Tools that utilize generative AI can auto-generate content or assist content creators in optimization, ensuring that the message is not only engaging but also reaches its intended audience. 
  • Generative AI can help a marketer create assets more efficiently once a marketer conceives of personalized content. Again, with the right kind of prompting, generative AI tools can create visual and written content that can be re-used efficiently across multiple platforms (ranging from the website to social media). 

But we strongly advise against entrusting AI with the task of drafting significant amounts of written content or generating images. This caution stems from ethical and legal concerns regarding AI potentially appropriating and utilizing the creative output of the originator without proper attribution or compensation. We also believe that algorithms will increasingly penalize detectable AI-generated content because ultimately the algorithms need human-produced content to maintain their relevance. Moreover, using AI to simply create content “just because we can” contributes to a broader problem: wasted content that contributes to digital waste. Contact us to learn how we can help you waste less and grow more. Learn more about our services here.