Now you would had to have been living under a rock not to know that Artificial Intelligence is flooding the news and working its way into our lives as each day passes. At the moment, we are very much in the fad stage of this technology, every company is shouting about how they use A.I in some form or another, it's cool to stick a "powered by A.I" badge on your shiny system or product, much like it was cool back in the 1980's to stick "turbo" onto everything from microwaves to hairdryers, it means exactly nothing other than playing a little bit of buzzword bingo to attract your attention.
Sorry, went off on a bit of a rant there, now what point was i trying to make? Oh yes, that's right, I wanted to try and answer the question of whether or not you should use A.I to generate your website content.
The very short answer is no, the longer answer is maybe, a little. I'll explain. So, it might seem like I am not an advocate of this new era of technology, but that isn't the case. Having a Masters Degree in Computer Science, with a specialism in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (before it was cool) I have always had a special interest in the technology.
A.I, as we have seen in countless videos on Social Media it is indeed pretty good at creating coherent pieces of content for website copy, social media posts, blog posts and more. But it has a few issues.
Firstly, accuracy. Perhaps the most prominent issue with the rise of A.I generated content is its accuracy. Not only are most Large Language Models (think ChatGPT) trained on data that is at least 12 months old, it is simply not "clever enough" to check whether content it generates is actually accurate, giving it an unfounded confidence in the material it produces, when in reality, the content is based off patterns and what output the model thinks is a good fit for the context or request, we call this "Hallucination". So the top and bottom of this one, you can create a blog post for your website in seconds, but there is a very good chance that the content could be false while and also outdated.
Secondly, uniqueness. As LLM's are trained off of huge amounts of data from various places (chatGPT contains information scraped from millions of websites for example), there is a very real chance of creating content that is at best plagiarism, at worst, copyright infringement. This can definitely cause a few headaches as your audience grows and your articles gain attention from the sources of your generated content. Best to avoid.
Finally SEO, word on the web street is that Google is currently gearing up to fight the slew of A.I generated content that is hitting results in various ways to ensure that content that is served to there users remains accurate and not full of poor content that can be a result of model hallucinations. What this means in terms of SEO for your site is that if you are using a lot of A.I generated content, you could be negatively ranked and your trustworthiness score could take a hit in future, pushing you further down the list. I must stress at the moment, Google's official stance on A.I generated content is "indifferent" to how you generate your content as long as it is accurate, but word in the development community suggests otherwise.
Okay, so I did promise the long answer, here it is. I do think there is room for A.I when it comes to helping you generate content and save you some time and effort, but the bad news folks, is you can't use it to write for you. For example, for our clients, and now for us as we start to build our new blog section, we recommend strategies to use A.I to help you build a post schedule, with various post ideas to help you get started. We focus on these areas as we find that most of our clients feel like they waste a lot of there time actually trying to come up with the topic to write about, this is where A.I can help! Simply open up something like chatGPT and ask it "generate me a list of themes for a series of blog posts in X topic" boom, within seconds you have a list of decent ideas to write your posts about. To save even more time, you can always go further and ask the model to bullet point a structure or list of talking points to highlight in a post to aid in the structure of your content.
Summary
So the wrap up, i'll be blunt. If your care about your audience and your Search Engine ranking, please don't generate all your content using A.I. By all means use it for generating your ideas or structuring your post talking points, but nothing will ever beat good old fashioned human input.
If you would like to discuss any point we have written about in today's article, please reach out. Similarly, if you would like to discuss your SEO content strategy with us, we would be happy to help.