Picture this: you open LinkedIn, ready to skim your network’s updates. Suddenly, a chill runs down your spine. There it is – your work, run through generative AI and posted under another name. This modern day horror story is haunting graphic designers and creative professionals around the world, and our team at Green Fin is no exception.

At Green Fin Studio, we spend hours researching, designing, and crafting original content grounded in facts. We have a strict no-AI policy for our final products because we believe so deeply in providing credible, unique products for our clients. So, it can be disheartening to see when our work is run through AI and used by other creators without attribution. We’re glad when our products inspire someone, but drawing inspiration to build something new is very different from running a source through AI to make something worse.

Plagiarism has always been a concern in the world of communications, but generative AI makes getting away with uncredited work easier than ever. In mere minutes, anyone can take a graphic or article they like, ask AI for a version of their own, and receive a shiny “new” product with no credit to the original creator. As an added misfortune, once your content goes into an AI tool, it’s there to stay within the system’s data, which means even more plagiarized versions could follow.

AI totes a ton of benefits. It’s quick and easy to use, and in many cases is entirely free to access. It may seem like a cost-effective shortcut for content creation, but looks can be deceiving. We like to say that AI content is “all icing and no cake” – in other words, your product might look nice at first glance, but the minute your audience cuts into the metaphorical “cake” of your content, the substance is missing entirely.

In an age where one in three newly published .com domains show signs of AI authorship (via The Pew Research Center), it’s important to highlight the advantages that human-made content has over AI. We’ve developed a chart below that shows how our work compares:

This Halloween season, let’s keep the haunting to the ghosts and leave AI out of our scary stories. Contact Green Fin Studio (hello@greenfinstudio.com) and work with a team of real, human environmental communication experts!