PhoneArena and generative AI
Last updated: January 2026
Generative AI tools are shaking up pretty much every industry, and this includes media and content creation. Actually, media and content creation are among those most affected by Gen AI.
On one hand, Gen AI tools are meant to enable dramatic productivity gains in the way we do research, write text, and create or edit images. But on the other hand, they present significant risks with regard to ethics and quality of coverage.
We’ve been carefully testing and experimenting with various Gen AI tools in a bid to understand exactly how, where, and when it makes sense for a media organization like PhoneArena to utilize them.
This testing period led us to formulate our current stance with regard to AI usage at PhoneArena. We distinguish two major areas for Gen AI usage: 1) content creation and 2) behind-the-scenes processes.
Gen AI and content creation
Simply put, using Gen AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, Claude, or other LLMs for content writing is currently forbidden at PhoneArena.
It’s extremely tempting, the thought of writing a short, barely comprehensible sentence, hitting a button, and watching a neatly formatted body of text magically unfold before your eyes. How awesome would it be to compress the time to write a full article or an in-depth product review to mere minutes… Alas, it doesn’t work that way, because beneath the surface of that neatly formatted writing sometimes dwells a mass of generic, misleading, and mostly useless text.
At least, that is the case when it comes to writing about cutting-edge developments that are unfolding as we speak – about things the AI model hasn’t been trained on yet. That is also the case when a piece of content can only be truly useful to a community of tech fans if it was created by an author with a decade of real-life experience covering the industry. It turns out, pretty much all of our content is like that.
So, at least until we can magically transfer all our memories, internalized knowledge, and thoughts into the computer using some sort of distant-future device like Neuralink, we will not be writing content using generative AI tools.
What we may use AI tools for
That said, there are some instances where using AI in the production process makes sense.
For example, AI chatbots are great inspiration engines. They can very quickly give you ideas for title or topic directions.
They are also quite good at identifying gaps in one’s work and suggesting bonus details to add or clarifications to make. As authors of content, we can definitely attest that writer’s block has never been a lesser challenge, thanks to the multitude of ideas an AI chatbot can quickly throw at you.
As writers, though, we firmly believe that it’s our duty to carefully sift through any AI-generated ideas and make sure only those that truly make sense are the ones that’ll be worked on.
Gen AI and behind-the-scenes processes
When it comes to non-user-facing work – many of the same considerations still stand, but we definitely aren’t as cautious. For example, coding, design, and data analysis are all areas we’re happily making more efficient, thanks to AI. Research in almost every field is also made that much faster using modern tools like Deep Research and Perplexity, that it’s often a crime to go the old-school way.
All types of administrative tasks related to the daily operations at PhoneArena are also subject to intense optimization via AI. Sadly, it’s not always possible to optimize or fully automate a process via AI yet, but we do actively seek such opportunities.
In short, whatever can make our organization faster is a welcome upgrade to our processes. However, we strive to keep content creation isolated from any type of AI meddling, because this is the actual product our readers enjoy. We want to deliver exceptional written and media content, and it so happens that, at least for now, this can only be achieved with a lot of hard work from the expert authors at PhoneArena.