Most small business owners who use AI tools to help with writing do so sensibly. They use them to draft a starting point, check their thinking, save time on routine tasks or get past the blank page. That’s a perfectly reasonable way to work, and for the most part it causes no problems at all.
But there are some legal and practical risks around AI-generated content that are worth understanding, particularly as the tools become more capable and more widely used. A recent piece by Search Engine Land covering the legal consequences of using AI identifies nine areas where businesses face real risk. Most of them don’t require you to be a lawyer to understand, but they are worth taking seriously.
One of the most commonly misunderstood areas is intellectual property. If you use an AI tool to generate an image, a piece of text or a product description, who owns it? The honest answer is that this is still being worked out by courts and regulators in the UK and elsewhere, and the law has not fully caught up with the technology.
What is clear is that AI-generated content carries some risk of reproducing material that was used in training without proper attribution or licence. If an AI writing tool produces text that closely resembles existing published material, or if an AI image tool generates something that incorporates elements of a copyrighted image, the business that publishes that content could face a challenge. The fact that a tool produced it rather than a person doesn’t automatically provide a defence.
For most small businesses, the practical response is to use AI output as a draft to be edited and shaped rather than publishing it directly, and to be especially careful with images. If you’re using AI to generate product imagery or marketing visuals, it’s worth understanding the terms of the specific tool you’re using and what it says about ownership and indemnity.
AI writing tools can produce confident-sounding text that is factually wrong. This matters in any context, but it matters especially if your business operates in an area where accuracy is expected: professional services, health and wellbeing, financial guidance, legal information, trade advice. Publishing incorrect information, even unintentionally, can damage trust and, in some circumstances, create liability.
The practical rule is simple: any factual claim in AI-generated content needs to be checked before publication. If the tool states a figure, a regulation, a specification or a professional recommendation, verify it. This is good practice for human-written content too, but AI tools are particularly prone to plausible-sounding errors, sometimes called hallucinations, where they produce incorrect information with apparent confidence.
There is a growing expectation in some sectors and platforms that AI involvement in content creation is disclosed. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has been developing its position on this, particularly where AI-generated content could be mistaken for genuine customer testimonials, real photographs of people or independently produced editorial. Google has also made clear that the issue is not whether content was produced with AI, but whether it is helpful, accurate and trustworthy. Mass-produced AI content that isn’t edited, fact-checked or shaped by genuine human knowledge is more likely to perform poorly in search, not because it’s AI-generated, but because it tends to be generic and undifferentiated.
None of this is an argument against using AI tools. Used well, they are very useful for small business owners who don’t have large marketing teams or writing resources. The key is in how they’re used.
AI works best when it’s helping you say something you already know, not inventing things on your behalf. Using it to draft a blog post about a topic you know well, to improve the clarity of a service description you’ve already written, or to generate a starting point for a piece of content that you’ll review and edit, is entirely sensible. Using it to produce large volumes of content without editorial oversight, or to generate claims you haven’t verified, carries more risk.
The businesses that use AI most effectively tend to treat it the way they’d treat any other tool: useful within its limits, not a substitute for expertise or judgement.
If you’d like help producing website content that is accurate, well-written and designed to perform well in both traditional and AI-driven search, that’s something we can help with. Get in touch with the b:web team in Plymouth to find out more about our content and SEO services for small businesses.
