AI-generated content seems almost inescapable nowadays. Ever since its launch in January early this year, the popular artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot from OpenAI, ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. Indeed, the chatbot is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users. In just 5 days, the company surpassed 1 million users, and openai.com gets approximately 1 billion visits per month, according to explodingtopics.com. ChatGPT is another entry into a slew of artificial intelligence programs that have exploded in popularity in recent years.
ChatGPT has certainly proven to be very useful for content creation, translation, summation of concepts, and other capabilities. The general-purpose conversational chatbot can answer broad and specific questions, complete language translations, text summarizations, and even create content from scratch. It also is “intelligent” — it can regenerate responses based on user’s feedback, therefore refining its answers as it “learns” from queries from its users. In addition to ChatGPT, other writing tools such as Jasper and Writer already exist in the market and will likely only improve in time.
As you know from our previous articles, SEO blogging can be one of the most effective ways you can attract traffic to your website and drive conversions by attracting users with industry knowledge or useful informational articles. Given the impressive capabilities of AI, you may be wondering:
Can’t I just get ChatGPT to write my articles for me? What do I need an SEO blogging team for?!
(Yeah, this one’s a little personal).
AI Generated Content has some serious limitations.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT still has some pretty significant limitations. Large language models (LLMs) such as Chat are trained on sets of pre-existing information, images, and other content the artificial intelligence draws upon for its content creation, and this base knowledge repository is reflective of the programmer’s bias. If large language models are trained with biased data (whether intentionally or not) the resulting output will be biased.
Some experts warn that AI-generated content can have serious moral implications, including bias, plagiarism, intellectual property, misuse, and perpetuating potential misinformation and fake news. Today, we would like to walk you through some of the limitations of AI-generated content.
What is AI Generated Content, Anyway?
Put simply, AI-Generated content is any copy (i.e. blog articles, marketing materials, product descriptions/titles) that is created through artificial intelligence machine software. The AI system draws upon existing knowledge it has about a subject, and generates content for you.
AI generated content is developed in response to specific prompts. AI “writers” will generate content for you based on the prompts you give them, such as “Write me an article about the dangers of AI.” More specific commands will yield more specific results, and you can train an AI generator to produce the content you’re after by giving it several commands, which can help you specify tone, length, and other elements. The tool will then produce content that is seemingly unique, an amalgamation of complex algorithms that paraphrase and use machine learning to create content based on what it can retrieve from the Internet.
It Just Doesn’t Sound Human.
One of the most important aspects of good writing is knowing your audience and context. AI LLMs like ChatGPT struggle with the subtleties of context that we humans can easily grasp. That’s why a lot of AI-Generated content can sound flat, un-engaging, and well, not human.
People can usually tell pretty quickly when something is written by AI, and may be turned off from reading your copy. Machines struggle with understanding tone, or the way writing is communicated to affect a certain mood, attitude, and general cadence of a piece of content.
This can be particularly crucial when you are trying to convey a specific message, such as in news articles, advertisements, or other marketing avenues. More generally, AI as it stands nowadays really lacks in personal voice and tone, and considering the fact that humans really crave authenticity in today’s media landscape, this can be a very important factor to weigh when deciding whether you should generate your content through AI or hire a writer. In fact, 85% of consumers would rather see brands share content from real customers that than? use AI, according to an online survey from EnTribe.
It Could be Plagiarized.
Another issue that arises often with AI generated content is the threat of plagiarized content. There is some disagreement about whether AI generated content itself is actually plagiarism – in fact, AI-generated content has passed plagiarism detectors such as Grammarly or TurnitIn without the user needing to make any true edits. However, many AI programs do not use pure machine learning to create ‘unique’ content. AI relies on google searches and existing content on the Internet to produce unique content, and not many LLMs will list their sources in the finished copy.
According to the Writers Guild of America, “plagiarism is a feature of the AI process.” The WGA contends that AI content is merely a “regurgitation of what it’s fed.” Amid its current strike, the WGA has proposed regulations around the use of AI to protect writers. There have even been a few legal actions taken against AI plagiarism, such as when Getty Images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for stealing 12 million images to train their model, including their watermark “without permission or compensation.”
There are now many AI content detecting tools, such as CopyLeaks, Originality.ai, AI Detector Pro, and countless others. Google has stated that they have AI detector capabilities that will flag your content if as AI if it sense that it is written by a machine. That being said, many of these AI detectors, such as GPTZero and OpenAI’s Classifier are very flawed and can even be simply wrong in worse cases completely wrong.
It Lacks Creativity.
It may be very obvious that machine-created content lacks the creativity and original touch of content created by humans. Nevertheless, it is important to say that due to the fact that AI generated content is created as a result of algorithms, templates, or widely available knowledge, it tends to be quite repetitive and dull.
If you’re just looking for a quick and easy way to churn out data-driven content that does not include much reflection or insight, AI can be pretty effective. AI written copy may be effective enough to achieve your benchmarks of content creation if you are just looking to convey data-driven, or quantitative information with no frills. However, if you are hoping to catch people’s eyes with creative and emotional content, AI may fall short. The fact is, machine learning just has not reached the point of being able to see beauty in information, or understand the significance of creativity to the human experience. For example, AI is able to replicate Michael Jackson’s voice over a Bruno Mars song, but it lacks the nuances and creative adlibs the real Michael would add into his rendition of “Treasure,” today. Similarly, in writing, AI still struggles with writing poems or convincing article-length prose.
Google Does not Like AI-Generated Content.
According to its policies, using AI content generation tools is not overtly prohibited. However, there are ways using AI generated content can earn you a penalty from the search giant. Google has published formal guidance for AI generated content, stating that high-quality content will be rewarded, no matter how it is produced. Google’s ranking system prioritizes content it deems exhibits principles of EEAT: or expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Therefore, although AI content is not technically penalized, Google contends that unbridled use of automation to rise in SEO ranks will be considered spam, “to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies,” Google has said in the same aforementioned blog post. Content creators should be wary of relying entirely on automation, and merely use AI to augment content. Your best bet is still to rely on writers and experts with industry knowledge to produce quality content that will attract people to your site.
If you do use AI to assist in producing your content, Google advises that you must include an automation or AI disclosure into the written content to increase transparency. In the same breath, Google has also advised against including AI in the author byline, as this may turn users away from your post on the outset.
Source: Mike Khorev
Takeaways
Although there are many drawbacks to AI generated content, machine writing has a number of undeniable benefits. First of all, it’s very quick and scalable. AI tools can generate content in a number of minutes, compared to the hours it can take for a real writer to compose an article from scratch (such as yours truly). This quick turnaround can help you churn out lots of content, promoting more potential traffic to your website. A lot of AI tools are also free, while others charge a monthly subscription rate. This price point is very attractive, especially if you don’t have a budget to hire a content writer.
As a closing thought, here are some ways you can reign in the dangers of AI if you do decide to use it to generate content:
- AI Can Be Trained to Make Good Content. The more prompts you throw back to AI, the more you can train it to write in the style you want and create high-quality content. This can be a bit of a time sink, but will be well worth it!
- Proofread your articles! Human eyes are still necessary to maintain cohesion, check grammar, and general tonal errors. AI cannot simply replace human proofreaders when it comes to more incorporeal aspects of writing such as tone, style, and cadence.
- It should not be a crutch, but can be a good jumping off point. In this article, we warned you of the dangers of fully AI-generated content. However, AI can be that spark that ignites creativity that pushes you out of a days long writer’s block.
- AI Can Streamline Your Research Process. AI can do a lot of the initial heavy lifting for you in gathering relevant data sources and key points for your content.
Featured photo from Upsplash
