AI-made content in a local collaboration: where it helps and where it breaks trust

More and more people use AI tools to write the caption, touch up an image or draft a script. That is normal and there is nothing wrong with it in itself. But in a local collaboration it is worth being clear about where the line sits.

Why it matters more here than elsewhere

The entire value of a neighbourhood recommendation is that it is true: somebody went, tried it and is telling you about it. That is the only thing separating it from an ad. If nobody actually lived what gets published, nothing is left — however well written it is.

Where it helps

In everything that is not the testimony itself. Tidying up ideas you already had, fixing spelling, trimming text to fit, making a shorter version, translating into another language. None of that touches the part that matters.

Where it breaks trust

When it generates the experience itself. An opinion about a dish nobody ate, a photo of a place nobody visited, an invented detail that sounds plausible. At that point you are not saving time: you are publishing something false with your face next to it.

The quick test

Before posting, ask yourself whether you could defend every sentence if someone who was actually there asked you about it. Any sentence you could not defend does not belong there.

And if you are the business

It is worth talking about beforehand, without making a drama of it. Not to ban tools, but to make the only thing that really matters explicit: whatever gets told has to have happened.