The 4 Biggest Risks of Ungoverned AI Content (and How to Stop Them)

Key takeaways

• The risk is real and present: 57% of organizations acknowledge that they face a moderate to high risk from unsafe, unverified AI-generated content today.
• Leaders’ top concerns are significant: The biggest worries for executives include regulatory violations (51%), intellectual property and copyright infringement (47%), and the spread of inaccurate information (46%).
• A dangerous C-suite blind spot: C-suite executives are statistically more likely than marketers to underestimate the potent risks associated with using generative AI for content creation.
• Proactive guardrails are the best defense: Implementing automated governance is the most effective and scalable way to mitigate the financial, legal, and reputational damage that results from unsafe AI content.

One wrong sentence is all it takes

Generative AI is an exceptionally powerful tool for innovation and productivity, but it is not infallible. Without rigorous, automated oversight, the content it produces can introduce a host of serious risks into every corner of your organization. This isn’t a future problem; it’s happening right now. Our comprehensive survey of 266 enterprise executives, The AI Trust Gap, found that 57% of organizations believe they already face a moderate to high risk from unsafe AI content.

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, all it takes is one AI-generated factual “hallucination,” one subtly off-brand sentence, or one inadvertent regulatory oversight to inflict significant damage on your brand’s hard-won credibility and your company’s bottom line. The unprecedented speed and scale of AI mean that these seemingly small errors can multiply and propagate across your channels with alarming speed. The result? A minor issue is turned into a major crisis before a human team can even react.

According to our research, these are the top four risks of ungoverned AI content that keep enterprise leaders up at night:

1. Regulatory violations (51%): In highly regulated industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, and manufacturing, AI-generated content can inadvertently breach strict compliance mandates. For example, it might generate marketing copy that implies a guaranteed financial return or makes an unapproved medical claim, leading to hefty fines and serious legal action.
2. Intellectual property and copyright issues (47%): Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast, internet-scale datasets. As a result, their output can sometimes include text or ideas that are substantially similar to copyrighted material, creating significant and unforeseen legal exposure for your organization.
3. Inaccurate or misleading information (46%): AI models are well-known to “hallucinate” — confidently presenting incorrect facts, statistics, or quotes as truth. Publishing this kind of misinformation, even by accident, can rapidly erode customer trust and cause irreparable harm to your brand’s reputation as a credible authority.
4. Brand misalignment and tone inconsistency (41%): Your brand’s tone of voice is a carefully crafted strategic asset. An AI model, without specific guidance, doesn’t inherently understand its nuances. Unchecked AI content can feel generic and soulless at best, and completely off-brand and alienating to your audience at worst, slowly diluting your brand equity with every post.

The executive disconnect: Underestimating the threat from above

Worryingly, our report uncovered a potential blind spot at the highest levels of leadership. C-suite executives were found to be more likely than the marketers working on the front lines to believe that there are “no risks or few risks” associated with using AI.

This disconnect is perilous. If senior leadership underestimates the threat, they are far less likely to champion and invest in the essential governance and oversight tools needed for protection. You don’t want to wait until AI-generated content has got you into hot water until you act! This leaves the entire organization exposed and places an unfair burden on marketing and content teams to manually manage these complex risks without adequate support or resources. Aligning the entire organization on a proactive strategy for safe AI adoption isn’t optional; it’s a critical business imperative.

Markup AI tip: Define, automate, and enforce your standards

With Markup AI, you can transform your static brand guidelines, compliance rulebooks, and approved terminology lists into a dynamic and active set of automated guardrails. Our Content Guardian Agents℠ scan every single piece of content against these centrally-managed standards, assign a clear trust score, and automatically rewrite any output that doesn’t meet your precise criteria. This powerful automation turns risk management from a reactive, manual fire drill into a proactive, systematic, and scalable process.

Don’t get blindsided by AI risks. Get the data.

Our new report, The AI Trust Gap, details the top concerns of 266 enterprise leaders. Use these crucial insights to build a stronger, more urgent business case for implementing robust AI content governance in your organization. Download the free report today! 

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

What qualifies as “unsafe” AI content?

Unsafe AI content is any output that exposes your organization to financial, legal, or reputational risk. This includes, but isn’t limited to, content that is factually inaccurate, non-compliant with industry or government regulations, infringes on existing copyrights, or damages your brand’s reputation through tonal misalignment or inappropriate messaging.

How can we protect our unique brand voice when using AI at scale?

The key is to move beyond simple prompting and use a dedicated AI governance tool where you can centrally define your brand voice through specific stylistic rules, tonal attributes, and approved terminology. Markup AI allows you to create a single “source of truth” for your brand identity, ensuring that every piece of AI-generated content, regardless of who or what creates it, is perfectly and consistently aligned.

Are there effective tools to check for AI-driven copyright infringement?

While some standalone tools focus on basic plagiarism detection, a more robust and proactive approach is to combine them with configurable content guardrails. By creating and enforcing specific rules around sourcing, citations, and the use of original phrasing, you significantly reduce the risk of inadvertently publishing AI-generated content that’s too similar to existing copyrighted materials.