It seems like everyone is talking about AI-generated content nowadays. Whether it’s suing for plagiarism or making terrible Nick Cave lyrics, artificial intelligence is in the news. You might be thinking that you could take advantage of the wide range of chatbots, image generators, and content creators, but there are definitely reasons to avoid it. Here are just five of them.
You don’t know what the AI is using as its source
In order to build something like ChatGPT or DALL-E, you give a piece of software access to a lot of data, and it learns from the data to cobble together something from it. Unfortunately, these all need tonnes of data, and you don’t really have any idea where it’s coming from. Getty Images is suing Stable Diffusion for scraping its image library, and who can forget how easy it was to turn the chatbot Tay into a racist?
Every database and every piece of software are built by people, and with the AI industry already having a diversity problem, that means you don’t know where your freshly churned-out blog post and header image are coming from.
You’ll spend more time working on your query than doing the actual work
You know how difficult it is to find something online with vague queries. You have to build on your search term, add in the right keywords, and really work out what it is you want before you start to search for it. As an example, you wouldn’t just search for “car bumper”, would you? You’d search for “rear bumper 1997 Toyota Corolla”.
The same goes for AI queries. You can start out with something like “history of cheese” but you’ll eventually end up having to break it down into something like “500 words friendly tone history of blue stilton from Vale of Belvoir no recipe”. And with that kind of query, you might as well just write it yourself.
You’ll end up editing it all anyway to make it readable
An AI might generate a chunk of text that it thinks is right, but you can’t just paste it directly into your website and call it done. CNET tried using AI to write articles and discovered them riddled with inaccuracies, including basic maths errors. Once you fact-check everything it writes, you’ll still need to check that the tone and style match yours. And after all that work, as this Buzzfeed article shows, it still reads off.
Even chatbots get replaced by humans from time to time. If you’re going to be spending that much time cross-checking, why not just write it yourself?
You run the risk of getting hit by search engines
You might think that having a computer write your content is great for SEO because it’ll hit all the right keywords, it’ll produce the right number of words, and it’ll be logged by another computer. Computers like talking to computers, right?
Unfortunately, as AI gets better at writing content, search engine spiders are already one step ahead, looking at your content to pick out the stuff written for bots instead of for people. Google released its Helpful Content update in August, which focuses on lifting up content that people consider helpful and hiding content that is written just for search engine bots. Your content needs to be satisfying to your readers and written with first-hand expertise and focus.
You’re better than that, right?
When you need help from a business, and you ring them up, are you happy when you get an automated system you have to navigate? When you look for a tutorial online, and find a video, do you like it when it’s just an automated voice repeating a manual? When you’re researching something you want to buy, do you read all the reviews, or try to find the one where someone has actually used the product?
Then why do you think your readers want automated content? It’s just as frustrating for them as it is for you. And all the helpful and knowledgeable content you find online is exactly what your readers want to see when they’re on your website.
So don’t take the easy way out. Along with it being so much more work in the long run, you’re better than that. We’re all better than that.
