The Rise of AI-Generated Content on Social Media: Legal and Ethical Concerns

Intellectual property rights, misinformation, and lack of authenticity are the legal and ethical challenges AI-generated content poses for social media platforms and users. For these reasons, the government should introduce new laws to address the potential risks of AI-generated content and limit and protect users from deceptive practices and ethical implications. The media, businesses, and other creative industries may be impacted due to AI-generated content that may harm the industries rather than assist with improving efficiency. In this essay, I will provide examples of how companies may be impacted by AI-generated content, leading to new laws and regulations that need to be implemented.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization website, intellectual property (IP) is safeguarded by law through patents, copyrights, and trademarks. These empower individuals to attain recognition or financial gain from their inventions or creations (World Intellectual Property Organization, n.d.). Businesses, media, and creative individuals can protect their work through IP to prevent other corporations or entities from “stealing” their ideas, inventions, or patents for their greater good. The issue with AI-generated content is that it lacks copyright protection and has no ownership for the creator or developer of the intellectual property. An example is Getty Images vs. Stability AI, where the creative imaging firm sued Stability AI for copyright infringement when the AI model was being trained (Getty Images v. Stability AI, 2023). While the case is still ongoing, and another trial is set for June 2025, the judge suggested while these images are being copyrighted with the same licensing agreements, AI must have a law in place to caution users or advise them of where this intellectual property is coming from (Herbert Smith Freehills, 2025).

Misinformation and unreliable sources have been the kryptonite of AI, where users are unsure or skeptical of the information and data provided by AI-generated content, for cases like deepfakes and automated posts, where AI-generated content has gotten so pleasing to the typical user eye that it’s hard to pinpoint the posts' reality to verify the content's legitimacy. An extreme example of deepfake AI-generated content is when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being manipulated, threatening elections. In the original posts, Trudeau recommended a book titled “This Can’t be Happening” but was replaced by AI-generated content to say “How the Prime Minister stole freedom (PBS NewsHour, 2023).” This can harm his reputation and legitimacy as Prime Minister, leading the older generation or vulnerable persons to believe this content is genuine. A new law or statute that can be put into place is that any AI-generated content used to manipulate an audience must provide an onscreen disclosure or disclaimer tag acknowledging that AI made this content.

Overall, AI-generated content lacks authenticity regarding human connection and ethical implications. Many people suggest that due to this lack of authentic human feelings, they disregard AI-generated content as unrelatable or insensitive to how humans should be creative. A recent study by the University of Pittsburgh suggested that humans when reading AI-generated poems, believed that the content was more creative and artistic than Shakespeare or Dickinson (Flood, 2024). While this may seem beneficial to the arts, it may harm the industry's reputation rather than uplift the community. This is true because, with the improvement of AI-generated content daily, actual poets thinking critically about their abstract poem process are being withheld by AI software that constructs these poems within seconds. This diminishes the artistic value of poem-making and the literature being taken into account by humans who have studied or worked on these arts throughout their lives.

Overall, intellectual property rights, misinformation, and lack of authenticity are the legal and ethical challenges AI-generated content poses for social media platforms and users because they prevent authentic users from being accredited, manipulate audiences, and disregard the work of renowned artists in the industry. This is why AI-generated content must be regulated via disclosures, disclaimer tags, and AI-identified content to provide complete transparency for users when absorbing this type of content.