The Harm of Generative AI

Generative AI is everywhere. It writes articles, crafts marketing copy, makes fake videos, responds to emails, attempts to console customers through chatbots, and the list goes on. It’s fast, convenient, and sounds incredibly smart.

But amongst all the excitement is a harmful side to generative AI that needs more attention. Behind the glossy responses lies a growing list of risks, unintended consequences, and long-term harms.

Whether you’re a researcher relying on accuracy or a business leader trying to protect your brand, it’s time to take a closer look at the very real downsides of generative AI.

1. It Makes Things Up (and Sounds Confident Doing It)

Perhaps the most well-known flaw of generative AI is the one that keeps getting overlooked: it hallucinates.

Generative models don’t “know” facts. They predict the most likely next word in a sentence based on patterns from their training data. That means they can (and frequently do) generate false information, made-up statistics, and non-existent citations.

For researchers, this is a credibility minefield. For businesses, it’s a branding nightmare. Imagine your AI tool confidently telling a customer the wrong return policy, or worse, issuing fake legal or health advice.

2. It Floods the Internet With Junk Content

One of the detrimental consequences of generative AI is the sheer volume of low-quality content it’s producing.

AI can now make thousands of articles, reviews, comments, marketing content etc… often indistinguishable from human-written ones. As a result, the internet is being flooded with bland, repetitive, and misleading content, making it harder for anyone to find trustworthy sources.

This is particularly damaging in fields like research and education, where verifying the authenticity of a source is crucial. If you’re not careful, your sources might include AI-generated nonsense.

3. It Undermines Trust in Genuine Content

Ironically, as generative AI becomes more convincing, trust in all digital content is quickly beginning to erode.

People are starting to question:

• Was this article written by a human or a bot?

• Is this video real or a deepfake?

• Can I trust this review, or was it AI-generated by a competitor’s marketing team?

In a world where anything can be faked in seconds, authenticity becomes so much harder to prove, and infinitely more valuable. For brands, this means leaning into human voice and transparency will become a major differentiator.

4. It Reinforces Bias and Stereotypes

Generative AI learns from existing data. This means it reflects all the biases, stereotypes, and inequalities baked into that data.

This leads to subtle (or not-so-subtle) discrimination in generated content. Gender bias in job descriptions. Racial bias in image generation. Cultural bias in storytelling.

They’re showing up in real-world tools being deployed by real businesses. It’s not theoretical anymore. Furthermore, most users don’t even realise it’s happening.

5. It Weakens Critical Thinking

As generative AI gets better at writing (or convincing), there’s growing concern about its impact on human thinking.

Why analyse a dataset when you can get a neat summary in seconds? Why write from scratch when a tool can do it for you? Why bother fact-checking when the AI sounds so confident?

When we stop thinking critically about what we’re consuming and creating, we risk lowering standards across research, education, and professional work. It’s efficient, yes. But the toll is higher than we know.

Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should

Generative AI is powerful. But power without responsibility is a problem. And right now, we’re still trying our best to figure out how to use this technology without causing long-term harm.

If you’re a business leader, be careful what you automate. If you’re a researcher, scrutinise every output. And if you’re working with customer data, stay transparent about what’s human and what’s not.

It seems likely generative AI isn’t going away, but remember that we can choose how we use it. I vote we make that choice a thoughtful one.