AI Guidelines in Centre Marketing and Communications

The Strategic Marketing and Communications office, in consultation with the Office of Legal Affairs and Information Technology Services, has created the following guidelines for AI use in marketing and communications work. Third party vendors and freelancers who are creating content for Centre must also follow these guidelines. This is an evolving document, and we will convene regular discussions with Campus Communicators to contribute to the ongoing evolution of these guidelines. 
 
AI tools may be useful in assisting marketing and communications staff in the process of creating content for Centre College, but we must be aware of the potential risks, including disclosure of confidential information, or inadvertent violations of College policies.  
 
More broadly, we encourage staff across the College to experiment with using AI to create marketing collateral, ask questions, and share useful tools and feedback with each other though the Campus Communicators listserv or meetings.  

Guidelines

I. Staff must carefully review, edit, and fact-check any outcomes before publication.

• AI can be a springboard for idea generation, first drafts, repetitive tasks, or reviews and summaries of lengthy materials. 
• AI sometimes “hallucinates” incorrect or outdated information, and it cannot fact check itself. Make sure to review and fact-check AI results for brand, voice, tone, and accuracy.  
• AI may also introduce bias into the results because it was “trained” on biased internet content. Be sure to carefully review the results of any prompts and ask more than one reader or viewer to look it over before publishing.

II. We must be transparent about our use of AI and cite and source materials appropriately.

• Be transparent and be honest about your use of generative AI tools in preparing marketing and communications materials. Do not hide or misrepresent your use of the tool and be prepared to answer questions about how the tool contributed to the materials. Acknowledging the use of AI will help prevent accidental misrepresentation.  
• Do not impersonate other people or places. AI should never be used to generate photorealistic images or videos of students, faculty, or staff. While you may use AI tools to fix a flub in a recording or cover up an edit, never edit or change the image of another person without express consent. Never use AI to generate or misrepresent photorealistic images of Centre’s campus or campus buildings, or of Centre students, faculty, or staff in locations other than the one where the original photo was taken.  
• Include image credits or acknowledge other citations where appropriate, including listing the AI tool used. [See "Citing the use of AI" below.] There are still outstanding questions in the field about how the work of writers, artists, and designers are incorporated into AI and how that work may appear in the results of your prompt. We will continue to consult with experts and update this document accordingly. 

III. We must protect personal data and College intellectual property. You should assume that any information you input into an AI tool will become public and available for use by the tool or by others.

• It is prohibited to share information with any AI tool that is confidential under College policies and/or federal law (such as FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act)), including:  
  • Student information
  • Personnel information
  • College teaching and research materials
  • Information that the College has promised to keep confidential (e.g., contracts, health information, grant applications, reports, or other data)
  • Non-public information about the College
  • Financial information about the College or about individuals
• Ask yourself, “What information am I sharing with the AI tool just by asking this question? Or by asking for a summary of this information?” Be cautious.  
• Do not share intellectual property with the tool – whether it is yours or the College’s or someone else’s.  

Writing clear and creative prompts

• News and business technology website: https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-write-better-chatgpt-prompts-in-5-steps/
• Higher Ed AI Expert: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/working-with-ai-two-paths-to-prompting Dr. Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director of the Generative AI Lab.
• Project management blog for marketers: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/artificial-intelligence/ai-prompts-for-marketing 

Images, Audio, and Video

There is not a great deal of clarity about image generation with AI tools. Since some design tools learn from and may appropriate other designer’s images, Marketing and Communications only recommends using Adobe Firefly for image generation. Firefly is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite of design tools, and it is trained on images contained within Adobe’s database of stock images and public domain material to avoid copyright infringement. You may reach out to ITS about an Adobe license or request Marketing and Communications create a project for you.  

We do not recommend any other tools for image generation. However, we are aware that many offices on campus use Canva. If you use Canva’s AI tools to generate an image, please note that their terms of service say you must indicate that content is AI-generated in a way no user could reasonably miss or misunderstand. To learn more, visit Canva's terms of service. 

As noted in the Guidelines, you should never create content that impersonates people or places. AI should never be used to generate photorealistic images, videos, or audio of students, faculty, or staff. While you may use AI tools to remove “ums” or fix a flub in a recording, or cover up an edit, AI should not be used to create misleading content, generate deepfakes, or imitate real individuals without their consent. Never use AI to generate or misrepresent photorealistic images or video of Centre’s campus or campus buildings, or of Centre students, faculty, or staff in locations other than the one where the original photo was taken.  
 
AI may be used to create voice-over audio content, provided the audio does not impersonate or represent any identifiable individual, including Centre students, faculty, or staff members. When using AI in this capacity, please provide appropriate credit and reference the specific tool used.

Use cases 

The following are ways that you can incorporate AI into your work processes, remembering to review all of these for accuracy, voice, and tone:  

Brainstorming: AI can help you get started on the creative process, outline a communications or marketing plan, create a social media campaign, or write a first draft of a press release or blog post. AI can also create a list of content suggestions, generate interview questions, write code for websites, or make suggestions for information architecture.  

Synthesize, analyze, and summarize information: AI tools can quickly identify themes in content which can be used to determine content structure and navigation, such as: SEO terms, headlines, subheads, alt text for images, website headers, and H3 tags. You might also extract data from publicly available texts and organize it in tables and graphs.  

Review or create copy: You may prompt AI to check copy for inclusive language or implicit bias, generate transcriptions or captions of video or photos, write social media copy or video descriptions that are optimized for SEO, or write a first draft of a press release (before careful staff review and revisions).  

Scheduling and planning: AI tools can help create schedules for social media marketing campaigns and other communications efforts. AI can suggest a detailed plan for campaigns across platforms over a defined period of time.  

Shortening content: Prompt AI to generate an outline or rewrite a marketing email or press release in 300 words or less (or any number). Currently, it is not as useful for lengthening pre-existing content as the results are often repetitive.  

Images and design: You may modify images and video in ways that preserve the original intent of the image. For example, it is okay to remove a visible name from a nametag or a glass of wine from someone’s hand, but not to change the setting in which the photo was taken. You can also create animations, illustrations, and data visualizations. However, it is never acceptable to create photorealistic images or videos of individuals, including Centre faculty, students, or staff – or those who appear to be Centre faculty, students, or staff.  

Experiment: Play with AI when you have time, try out different prompts (“write a marketing email with an audience of prospective students” will get a different outcome than “write an email geared toward prospective parents”), iterate and talk to the tool (it can understand requests to "try again" or "make that shorter"), give it a little context (“you are a marketing manager creating content for the Facebook page of a liberal arts and sciences school.”).  

Citing the use of AI  

As an academic institution, transparency and trust are crucial for the materials we produce representing Centre College, even when it comes to marketing. Standards for citing AI in marketing work (and in academic work) are likely to change over the next several years. Here is a place to start for citing AI use in marketing: 

• Drafts of articles, social posts, and other written content must undergo editing, fact checking, and/or review by staff and as such, do not require credit.  
• Images that are edited or modified do not require an image credit.
• Illustrations and other images generated with AI must include a photo or design credit. Examples: Created using [AI tool name] OR Image credit: [AI tool name]  

Many of the tools that used today have AI built in – from Grammarly to Adobe. You are responsible for being familiar with how AI is part of your work processes. Never use AI for something you would not want anyone to know you used AI to create.

Copyright

The Library Copyright Alliance Principles for Copyright and Artificial Intelligence assert that, according to well-established legal precedents, the use of copyrighted works to develop large language models or other AI training databases typically constitutes fair use. Nevertheless, there is a risk that AI-generated content could include output that closely matches copyrighted material. Therefore, Centre employees should make edits or modifications to any content produced by AI to prevent any unintentional infringement or potential allegations of misconduct. Additionally, Centre employees should not produce long-form content using AI alone and should never use copyrighted characters or images in your prompts.  Read the Library Copyright Alliance Principles.

 

Updated October 2024.

Please note: There are a variety of artificial intelligence tools available for use in marketing, design, and communications and more emerging each day. While Strategic Marketing and Communications encourages staff experimentation with AI tools, make sure that you look for those that make it easy to find their privacy policies, ethics, and accessibility guidelines. When in doubt, talk to MarComm or ITS.  

This is an evolving document. If you have questions or suggestions for additions or changes, please reach out to communications@centre.edu