The GrAIy Market 2.0
When Humans Use AI to Automate Owned Media
On June 8th, a story I recognized appeared in my LinkedIn feed under an unexpected source. It was about the same topic I had posted about the week before. Finding the post in my feed was no surprise. Seeing my structure, my thinking, and my words lifted without attribution was.
Gray markets move genuine goods by unauthorized means.
This is the reality of the AI gray market: it is not AI itself generating plausible “slop” content that threatens brands and authentic authorship, but the people wielding it.
Author content that sails above the churn. Original photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash.
Anatomy of a Capture
A gray marketer hunts for content to target. This is not research or curation; this is capture and lift. They watch for emerging trends and articles gaining traction, going shopping for content without learning the market or its dynamics.
My original post1 covered a Fortune article about Rob Giglio’s experience at Canva, an account of how organizations adopt AI that was well worth reading.2 I created the post that became one of my most successful, generating wide comment and reposts. The pattern is consistent with a familiar process: a post pasted, likely alongside the Fortune piece, into an AI with an instruction along the lines of “write an original feature on this, in our voice.” Three distinct gray market tells point to an AI rewrite process that keeps content anchors and rebuilds the rest.
First, the AI keeps the most distinctive, high-information sentences intact and regenerates the filler around them. The high-salience words and human authentic phrases, the ones carrying the core meaning, are the hardest to reword without changing context. So they survive as anchors, while the lower-density context gets paraphrased around them. The stickiest sentences are the ones that stay. My original phrasing sits on the left, their rewrite on the right:
The anchors carry through nearly word for word. Only the connective tissue moves.
Second, while my original post directed traffic outward to the source Fortune article, the lifted LinkedIn posts pointed to their owned-media hub. Owned media is built to point at itself; that is its purpose, to route an audience back to the brand. The posts point to their own expanded version of the post, complete with fabricated section headers and generative transitions. The pattern matches a familiar AI expansion prompt: take this post, make it a feature, put it in our voice. So the reader is sent inward, to the copy, and not out to the source. Attribution sends attention to the origin. Gray market tries to own it.
Third, the article added a section titled “We’ve Been Saying This for a While,” claiming the view as the publication’s long-standing position. Whether generated by an AI performing editorial authority or inserted by style or direction, the result is the same: with no source to credit, a fabricated claim of continuity supplies the credibility the byline did not earn.
Three signs, one conclusion: the piece was assembled, not originated. The Fortune article never used a programming frame. My post did, drawn from a conference talk and my AI literacy course. The rewrite carried it through every parallel: the chat bar as a computer, the prompt as a command, the specification, the developer’s mindset. None of that is in the source. My experience became the gray marketer’s. They trade on the plausibility trap, the reader’s inability to tell borrowed framing and phrasing from earned, and sell media that is owned but not authored. No brand should accept it.
How this AI gray market is evolving
When I first wrote about the gray market in 2024, I believed the threat to intellectual property and human expression centered on machines exploiting copyrighted data.3 What was once a machine operating on unauthorized content has given way to humans using algorithms to launder earned insight. This 2.0 version is far more insidious, because a human now wields the algorithm.
In this gray market, someone takes your framework, your idea, your way of seeing a problem, your words, runs it through an AI, and ships the paraphrase under their own name on their own channel, without reference, link, or attribution. Posting and reposting attributed content expands the conversation for the originating author. The gray market, by contrast, trades on your earned expertise to claim ownership of experiences it never lived.
Ordinary plagiarism copies the words. This copies everything the words were carrying: the structure that moves a reader, the frame that makes an idea legible, the sequence of the argument, the metaphors, the lived expertise underneath. Every sentence can change and all of it still transfers. That is why the paraphrase passes AI detections. The expression is new, so nothing trips the alarm, while the authorship, the part that was actually earned, is presented under a different name, a different owner.
Consumer goods brands constantly fight gray markets. Genuine products, like athletic sneakers, watches, and even pharmaceuticals, reach buyers through unauthorized channels, and this parallel flow degrades both the market and the brand. The greatest threat is that this alternative pipeline erodes the vital connection between the authentic brand and its customers.4
The gray marketer propagates words and intent without ever doing the work of writing, running human framing and voice through an AI to produce performative copy.
Compelling content is now urgent. Humans recognize human expression. So, increasingly, do the engines. The engines that power search and discovery reward concrete, first-person, original-framing signals, the marks of authentic work.
“Words are prized for their commercial value, not for association with the author’s name.”
Naomi S. Baron
The need for human writers
Ironically, AI advances intensify the demand for human writers. Audiences are getting better at spotting the performance of writing. AI-generated content, once dismissed as “slop,” is now ignored. Indifference is the ultimate failure of a brand. And the engines are getting better at reading patterns in text and surfacing the first-hand, original work a model cannot produce on its own.
Under that pressure, when licensing is not realistic, the gray market is a cheap alternative. Take a well-built piece, run it through an AI, keep the human spine and the phrases that carry the humanity. An insightful LinkedIn post becomes a full-length article on another site.
A crafted piece has a story spine, narrative action moving toward a revealing noesis (the aha moment). The reader does not consciously note the structure; they experience it. The writer’s experience, expertise, insight, and perspective do the marketer’s homework. That is what effective writing does: it informs and persuades, whereas the gray marketer performs authorship.
AI gives the gray marketer urgency and scale. They can now offer “owned-media-content-as-a-service.” A branded blog post drops from hours to minutes. The traditional flow takes hours of research and drafting from domain expertise, and it attributes its sources, adding to the conversation. The gray market flow is efficient. The AI takes no perspective, because it cannot hold one. It starts from others’ work and prompted style guidance, then produces a replica. It does not write a new article. It produces a replica the marketer brands to order. It obfuscates the source and brands the copy. But urgency and scale are not brand attributes.
The gray market is a brand decision
Choosing to own media rather than author it is choosing efficiency over the outcome. The machine scales expression. The human context anchors the truth.
Years ago, I was a product manager at an internet startup that monitored brand mentions. Tracking brands on the web, I realized we were tracking the tide: shifts in zeitgeist, attention, and mindshare, all of it moving the metrics between a brand and its customers.
A seasoned PR executive challenged our entire model, telling us that only twelve outlets matter. This was where we had to watch from, where our customers formed their opinions, and where our stories and our message had to show up.
Traditional media and online channels are ebbing. Using an AI to generate owned media only adds to that flow; it does not change the pull of the tide. Far better to build a brand visible on the horizon and sailing above the churn.
Does generated content work even if the byline varies, but the prompt doesn’t? Are the hundreds of articles produced worth it if all the content speaks with one banal voice, the same sentence structure? Human expression exists only within quotes and anchoring phrases, and the rest is a sentence that ferries the reader from one anchor to the next without holding a thought of its own.
Laundering your own story
The danger is not only outside your walls. An employee on deadline, with AI tools, produces the same laundered output. When it surfaces, the brand bears the brunt, not the AI or the employee.
AI makes content too easy to fabricate. The gray market is that abuse. The answer is not to avoid AI. An AI used as a strategic asset builds your authority. An AI used as an efficiency engine launders someone else’s. One is a moat. The other is a liability.
Building the moat takes two things: a style guide and literacy. A style guide does for the model what your brand guide does for your voice. It sets the boundaries. Literacy makes the savvy user. That user knows their intent and mindset, sees where the AI’s defaults pull against both, and recognizes the flows that produce gray market content. Without both, your workforce is exposed on both sides of the gray market, as consumer and as producer.
Authenticity in AI is not about rejecting the technology; it is about making deliberate choices in how it is integrated, transparently declaring its influence, and ensuring its use aligns with intention and purpose.
— Assisting Intelligence
When you author the content, you own it, and you own the conversation, the connection between your brand and the audience. Owned media is a commodity dressed as ease. Authored media is yours. Choose authorship. Build authentic.
Author content that sails above the churn. Original photo by Alexandros Giannakakis on Unsplash.
Assisting Intelligence
My original authentic post made a simple argument: a prompt is a command, and an AI doesn’t originate, it computes. A starting point with AI is a programmer’s mindset. You build the specification before the AI sees a word. You test the outcome. Most of all, you learn how to improve your own authentic expression: your thought, perspective, and experience, not the AI’s or someone else’s.
Approaches that build that mindset: an AI style guide that sets the org’s perspective and direction, and the AI literacy to think before you prompt. That is the authority our programs build: AI Style Guide Development | AI Literacy
Ancora Imparo.
LinkedIn post from 6/2 on had over 25,000 impressions, hundreds of engagements and comments in the first week.
The Source Fortune Article. We gave our 5,000 employees a week to do nothing but learn AI. We learned the biggest blockers are human ones. By Rob Giglio May 28, 2026 Fortune Online. Rob Giglio is Chief Customer Officer at Canva. https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/canva-ai-discovery-week-human-behavior-change-giglio/
I’ve been saying this for a while now. The Gray Market, Assisting Intelligence, Mike O’Brien, (SmarterMedium, 2024), p. 124.
I’ve been reading about the gray market for a while too. In 2018, I worked with a global brand to develop their training on their Gray Market.
Naomi S. Baron, Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing (Stanford University Press, 2023), p. 176.