After ChatGPT exploded in popularity and reached over 100 million users in January 2023, artificial intelligence tools seem to be popping up everywhere. They’ve been used to write and debug code, summarize lengthy texts, and explain concepts in a particular style — pretty much instantly.
While it’s easy to get excited and rush in to using a cool new tool like AI for your website or digital content creation, it’s important to be mindful of all the other factors and unintended consequences that may arise.
Remember, AI-Generated Content is Generic
Since AI relies on information that already exists, it can’t create anything new. It can mimic tones, styles, and ideas, but ultimately it just makes it easier to produce the similar content as everyone else.
You can use it to make a blog with the exact right SEO keywords, but it may not stand out enough to catch the attention of a human reader.
AI Tools Have Subtle, Built-In Biases
Tools like ChatGPT that are trained on the modern internet tend to produce biased content, because, well, the internet is full of it.
For example, DALL-E 2, a popular image-generating AI tool, predominantly generates images of white people. Even when race and ethnicity are left out of the prompt.
When using AI to generate your own content, check for things like this. Make sure you’re not accidentally excluding a major segment of your target audience.
Beware of Potential Penalties from Google
There’s no official documentation about if or how Google will penalize using AI content. But it’s probably safe to assume that it falls under the “automatically generated” content category.
Here are some examples of how automatically generated content is against Google’s policies:
- Text that makes no sense to the reader but contains search keywords
- Text translated by an automated tool without human review before publishing
- Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience
- Text generated using unnatural synonyms, paraphrasing, or obfuscation techniques
- Text generated from scraping feeds or search results
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value
So…yeah. Maybe Definitely make sure that you’re not doing any of that when using an AI copywriter or assistant to speed up your content creation process.
As we continue to see more applications and benefits with AI tools in the near future, don’t forget that unintended consequences follow new tech everywhere. Always make sure to do a human edit before publishing content, and be mindful of how you’re using different tools as they emerge.
Got any questions about how this might affect your local business? Give us a shout any time!
