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Red lines: GenAI, content and you
Learnings from our inaugural panel event

What are your red lines around using GenAI in content marketing? We explored that topic with an audience of great clients, colleagues and friends during an in-person event in November at Shakespeare’s Globe, and heard many possible answers, rather than one. We flew in senior editor Shirley Siluk to take part in the panel discussion.
That’s the beauty of face-to-face conversations in the real world. When you engage in discussions with other people, you encounter multiple perspectives, different ways of thinking about the same subject, new angles to explore. That’s not to say that there’s no right answer to any question – two plus two always adds up to four, and the word ‘strawberry’ has three rs, not two. But more complex questions tend to have more complex and multifaceted answers. They demand thoughtfulness and time to respond to in a meaningful way.

Tony Hallett (MD, Collective Content), Will Sturgeon (Head of Content and Thought Leadership, PwC) and Shirley Siluk (Senior Editor, Collective Content)
And that’s the main takeaway from our event – ‘Red lines: GenAI, content and you’: communication with, by and for people will always be richer, more resonant and more rewarding than a series of words generated by a large language model responding to a human query. We understand the appeal of having an all-knowing answer machine. But that’s not what GenAI is.
GenAI is effective at stringing together words in intelligent-sounding ways. But real intelligence – the kind that makes for nuanced, interesting and trustworthy content – comes from people with real-world expertise who understand the meaning of words and ideas, not just the probability that ‘marketing’ is likely to follow the word ‘content.’ GenAI can’t replace the insights you’ll get from a conversation with friends over a coffee, at a conference of industry experts or in a meeting with your colleagues. The real human value of two people engaging with each other and having meaningful conversation can’t be matched by a machine.
From our event

From our blog
![]() | Evolving GenAI guidelines: Collective Content’s AI Policy 2.0 We’ve already introduced our new AI policy, but this blog post brings you along for the ride of creating it. |
Your “critical thinking” makes you unique – and GenAI can’t help you with that Find out what else was shared at the event by panellists and audience members alike. | ![]() |
![]() | Successful habits of great content marketers Senior Editor Julian Heathcote talks us through the learnings from the Content Marketing Institute’s B2B Marketing Outlook for 2025. |
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Word of the Moment: Agentic
As in, agentic AI. The next generation of tools moving on from generative AI. Agentic AI is tech that can automate processes, 'make decisions' and operate with little human supervision. If you haven't heard this word used, you will soon.