AI and brand protection
Table of contents
As is the case with most technological advancements, AI and machine learning create both risks and opportunities for online brand protection. AI tools make it much easier for fraudsters to infringe on brands’ IP rights, but they also provide brands with faster and more versatile opportunities to protect themselves against these very same infringements.
Thus, it’s easy to see that the increasing presence of AI and its comprehensive applications reshape our industry and necessitate fundamental changes in brands’ approach to protecting their invaluable IP assets.
In a digital world where anything can be mimicked, authenticity has become a fundamental element to earn your customers’ trust. Maintaining and proving your brand’s authenticity is thus essential for success amongst rising digital threats, which puts online brand protection - a discipline that aims to do exactly that - at the center of your branding and marketing efforts.
Why AI matters for modern brand safety
AI provides brands with scalable, advanced, and very precise tools to protect their reputation and IP assets. Moreover, as a growing number of threats have AI origins as well, traditional methods may not be sufficient anymore to successfully combat them.
And, as AI-based threats proliferate in e-Commerce, brands that integrate AI-powered tools into their brand safety strategy gain a critical competitive advantage and can position themselves as innovative leaders in this rapidly evolving field.
Counterfeiting, brand impersonation, and other IP-infringing activities generate an increasing amount of fraudulent content across the entire internet, including touchpoints such as social media platforms, online marketplaces, single webshops, and the darknet. Traditional, manual monitoring techniques are unable to keep pace with the comprehensive web of infringement cases.
| Manual monitoring can no longer sufficiently cover all IP threats - AI threats need AI solutions
However, AI-based solutions are more than up to the task. Thanks to increasingly versatile and scalable tools, AI delivers measurable value to modern brand safety strategies. Its features include 24/7 automated monitoring, proactive risk identification and response, as well as unparalleled scalability that allows companies of all sizes, from start-ups to multinational conglomerates, to protect their IP assets and their customers from the dangers of infringement.
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As LLM systems understand context and meaning as well as cultural nuances in all kinds of content, they’re better at detecting potentially infringing content than simple keyword-based software tools. The continuous training of AI engines brings about improved accuracy across the field, ensuring that even the newest threats are swiftly recognized and detected.
All these features contribute to the increasingly efficient deployment of brand safety strategies, reducing costs and raising ROI.
AI-based challenges
Along with unparalleled opportunities, AI tools also present several unique challenges that brands need to be aware of.
AI-based tools can create deceptively authentic-looking content, including deepfakes, which significantly increases the risk of impersonation. Your brand’s IP rights have never been more vulnerable, and the threshold for criminals has never been lower. After all, anyone with access to ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other AI platform can create increasingly convincing fake content, which can cause your brand devastating losses in terms of revenue, reputation, and consumer trust.
| AI-based tools can create deceptively authentic-looking content, including deepfakes
AI tools can contribute to several types of cybersecurity threats, including highly sophisticated cases of phishing and algorithmic manipulation. The developments in this area are truly alarming.
However, criminal activity is not the only challenge posed by AI. In fact, an over-reliance on AI tools can similarly damage your brand image in the long term.
Over-automation can lead to an erosion of your brand’s unique voice and may contribute to losing customers to your competitors. In addition, as content generated by AI-powered software tools can still carry mistakes, you risk inconsistencies in your messaging at best, and misrepresentation at worst.
And let’s not forget about the general trademark and copyright issues raised by AI. As AI platforms draw their input from all over the internet, you may inadvertently infringe on someone else’s IP rights when using AI-created content crafted with input from their original content. Such an embarrassing incident may lead to unforeseen ethical and legal issues, which are, needless to say, quite detrimental to your brand’s reputation.
Key strategies for AI-driven brand protection
Several key strategies are available for incorporating AI into your brand safety strategy. Depending on several factors, like the nature of your products, your company’s size, typical workflows, and your available resources, you may choose to follow only one or all of them, or any combination of these strategies.
IP Protection
Trademarks, copyright, patents, and advanced authentication, such as QR codes for product verification
Registering your IP rights in your target markets is the first step to guarantee their legal protection. These assets are also crucial for your brand identity, as they significantly contribute to the features that make your brand and/or products recognizable.
To counter the growing risk of impersonation, the introduction of advanced identification options has become necessary. Serialized QR codes, for instance, are perfect for this task.
Serialized QR codes are unique to a specific product, and each one corresponds to a single entry in a central database. This feature allows users to verify the origin and authenticity of the product within seconds. It also enables brands and sellers to track their products better as they move through the distribution chain.
Other authentication technologies include secure QR codes featuring built-in protection against copying, hologram labels that change their appearance under specific lighting, RFID tags that carry all the necessary data, as well as unique alphanumeric codes that enable both tracking and identification of products.
Monitoring
Use of AI-featured platforms that perform real-time monitoring to detect infringements, automate takedowns, and identify counterfeit threats
Registering your IP rights is not enough. You also need to monitor the internet to detect potential cases of infringement and take swift action against them.
Monitoring platforms enhanced by AI components can deliver all that and more. Marketplaces, social media platforms, domains, images, and many other digital locations can host a wide array of infringing content.
These advantages are exactly why we integrate AI into our image monitoring solution, infrimage
The added AI-based features allow infrimage to organize and filter its extensive search results faster and even more efficiently.
Real-time monitoring ensures that such content is detected as quickly as possible, whether we’re talking about a counterfeit product listing on an online marketplace or a single webshop, a copied image, or influencer content promoting lookalikes on social media.
AI tools can enhance the speed and efficiency of online monitoring, ensuring that more suspicious content is identified within a shorter amount of time. Based on recognition of past counterfeiting patterns, AI tools can also help predict where the next case of infringement is most likely to pop up, ensuring an even more timely response.
Enforcing your rights can also be enhanced by AI. Automating takedown processes makes them faster and more efficient, ensuring that the exposure of the general public to IP-infringing content is as limited as possible.
Governance
Internal policies guiding responsible AI use, model validation, data privacy, and ethical compliance across marketing, legal, and IT
When a major development like AI comes along, it’s imperative to update your company’s internal procedures to better accommodate the new situation.
AI is a very versatile resource, which necessitates detailed and well-defined rules about responsible AI use. Developing new policies or updating your current ones is important to clearly let your employees know what’s allowed and what’s forbidden when it comes to AI.
Given AI’s potential for content creation, your policies need to address the issue of data privacy and security. Clear definitions and code of conduct are needed for protecting trademarks and copyrights (both yours and other parties’, whose intellectual property your AI tools use), and to prevent any data breaches.
The same ethical principles and internal rules must be observed throughout the entire AI workflow, from model validation through research and data analytics to content creation. All teams within your organization must be aware of these rules and work together to uphold them. This usually necessitates training sessions for all employees that come into contact with AI, including IT, legal, and marketing teams.
Content Integrity
Measures to ensure consistent messaging, language model optimization (LMO), and accuracy in AI-assisted touchpoints
Ensuring the integrity of your brand’s content and messaging across all channels is a challenge, even when humans generate all the output. But if your brand capitalizes on the opportunities provided by LLM platforms, this challenge becomes much more pronounced, which is why you need to make an effort to ensure consistent messaging in all your AI-generated content.
You need to set clear guidelines to determine your brand voice and messaging history, and include them in your prompts to create content. You can also train your AI engine with sample texts and imagery from your brand to ensure consistency and best value representation.
Traditional search engines like Google rely on keywords (among several other features) to determine if a certain website is a good match for the search terms the user typed into the bar. However, this approach is no longer entirely relevant, because instead of simple keywords, LLMs are more context-aware and work with more conversational texts.
This means that besides traditional SEO, you also have to focus on LMO, language model optimization, to ensure that your brand’s content is findable and accurately represented by AI search engines. For this to work, you need to display conversational, well-structured, regularly updated, authentic, and accurate content across all your channels.
Accuracy is key. With countless other sources to compare against, AI engines are increasingly capable of separating trustworthy information from fake, favoring those it deems more accurate. All in all, this means that AI-assisted touchpoints like chatbots and search results need quality content, including text, images, and data, to favorably represent your brand.
Organizational Training
Education on AI risks, security, best practices, and responsible use across teams
With the rapid development of this technology, it’s important to keep your employees’ AI training up-to-date. All teams that come into contact with AI need to undergo regular training on the associated risks of using (and misusing) AI, including potential security breaches, IP infringement, impersonation, and much more.
Depending on the nature of their work, some teams may need more specific training on the best practices of content generation, responsible use to evade potential cases of copyright infringement, and how to best shape branded content according to the principles of LMO.
Threats and opportunities evolve rapidly with new developments of AI, which means that AI education must be an ongoing process so your employees are able to keep up with the newest developments in the area.
Balancing AI efficiency with brand authenticity
While AI tools are extremely helpful for saving time and increasing efficiency, relying on them too much can be detrimental to your brand image. Overly heavy AI usage can dilute your brand’s messaging and image, which results in a loss of customer loyalty and trust.
With the increasing usage of AI, consumers can start picking up on the small differences between AI- and human-generated content. Too heavy AI usage can detract from your brand’s authenticity and thus decrease the overall value of your brand.
This is why regular human intervention and oversight are essential to maintain brand nuance and a personal connection to your customers. Human oversight also contributes to more aligned messaging and less potential for communication errors.
On the other hand, AI-generated deepfakes, fake reviews, and even entire fake social media brand accounts compete with your own channels. Amidst such a storm of increasingly convincing fakes, consumers may find it hard to distinguish between real and inauthentic brand voices.
To combat this challenge, it’s best to employ a combination of AI-based monitoring tools with invaluable human expertise. AI tools allow you to rapidly scan for, detect, analyze, and respond to digital threats with unparalleled efficiency and scale. However, human expertise is essential for handling edge cases, detecting and discarding false positives (e.g., a legitimate fan account that doesn’t pretend to be your brand), and including ethical and/or legal solutions to complex cases of infringement.
These hybrid intelligence solutions, employed by innovative online brand protection companies, combine the advantages of human expertise and AI-based efficiency while allowing each to compensate for any weaknesses of the other.
| Hybrid intelligence solutions combine the advantages of human expertise and AI-based efficiency
This means that the speed and volume of monitoring are set by the capacities of AI. However, the human team steps in and takes over in evaluating high-impact cases, devising and deploying ethical and legal solutions, analyzing and judging ambiguous cases, and communicating with stakeholders and the general public in a professional yet compassionate tone.
This innovative blend of AI capabilities and human expertise is the best way to tackle the arising challenges in today’s increasingly perilous e-Commerce environment. Forward-thinking brands that want the best solutions for the protection of their invaluable IP assets recognize the hybrid approach as the future of authentic and scalable online brand protection.
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Future outlook: compliance, ethics, and beyond
The application of AI tools in general has raised a number of questions across all industries. As the technology develops at a breakneck speed, new applications arise daily, but with them come new concerns as well.
AI is going to be even more integrated into the operation of businesses on both strategic and practical levels. However, the ethical concerns these applications raise necessitate regulators to catch up and address these issues to balance innovation with accountability. Companies also need to update their own processes to counter the risks posed by the misuse of AI.
As for the particular application of AI in online brand protection, we believe that a perspective shift is necessary.
Companies often view online brand protection as a necessary feature to safeguard their IP rights, and rightly so. However, with the incorporation of AI into crucial processes, including e-Commerce product searches, online brand protection transforms itself from a cost center to a trust-driven growth strategy.
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With continuous innovation and vigilance, online brand protection measures eliminate fraudulent content (both AI-generated and traditional) that damages your brand’s reputation and diminishes your customers’ trust. This allows your genuine content to shine, leading both AI-assisted and regular search engines to your authentic channels.
Aided by AI-powered tools, online brand protection measures will become even more efficient. We will be able to detect potential infringement cases in or at least near real-time, facilitating a much faster response and significantly diminishing the damage such infringing content causes to your brand.
However, that’s only the beginning. Thanks to the predictive capabilities of AI, potential counterfeiting threats can be expected before they even arise, allowing us to anticipate a threat and prepare to address it much more efficiently than before. Consequently, brands will be able to allocate their resources better for maximum efficiency and further limit potential damages caused by IP infringements.
| With the predictive capabilities of AI, potential counterfeiting threats can be expected before they even arise
The online brand protection industry also directs attention to the ethical use of AI. Infringing on somebody else’s copyright is never acceptable, even if the infringements have unintentionally slipped into your AI-generated content. This is why we advocate for the presence of human oversight.
Brands must find a balance between AI-assisted workflows and human oversight to eliminate costly legal and ethical mistakes, avoid bias, ensure fairness, and keep the human touch of your communication efforts, which is essential for gaining and keeping consumer trust.
This applies to online brand protection experts as well; after all, we must practice what we preach. We have to ensure complete transparency about the involvement of AI-powered tools in our brand monitoring and content moderation services, as that’s the only way to maintain our credibility with our customers and business partners.
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FAQ
Find answers to the most frequently asked questions for AI and online brand protection.
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