AI for Generating Content: Friend or Foe?

AI has gone from futuristic to reality. While industries like manufacturing, customer service, and FinTech are leveraging AI to automate business taskforce, Artificial Intelligence has become a dilemma for marketers and search engines. So is content marketing up next? Will AI-generated content replace the writer’s column? Read to find out!

Marketers had a massive reality check when ChatGPT’s Open AI platform burst onto the scene last November. From the days of Eliza (the first chatbot launched more than six decades ago) till date a lot has changed. How? Well, ChatGPT smashed all records and became the fastest application to reach 100 million active users. Generative AI became a buzzword for every marketer, and soon AI-generated content gained traction because they were writers’ shortcuts to fill their word count and create content. Undauntedly the open AI platform came with its share of fireworks and triumphs, but there were some tragedies as well.

The Cons of AI-Generated Content

If you have used ChatGPT, you probably know how it writes content faster than a speeding bullet. The debate between the pros and cons of AI-generated content was still hot when Forrester Research called AI-generated content “coherent nonsense”. Several visionaries express their concern about AI-generated content, and one of them was John Muller from Google.

Things got interesting on a Twitter feed when people bombarded questions about whether AI can be used to write and publish content online. The replies were cautiously written, but they criticized AI as much as they could. Muller compared AI-generated content with toxic chemicals in food, and we couldn’t agree more.

Good, Bad, and Ugly of AI-generated Content

In a world where the pressure to produce engaging and high-quality content is unreal, AI is a swift game-changing tool for writers to automate content creation and improve efficiency. However, there are many cons to AI-generated content.

• For one, it lacks the human touch. Writing is a creative journey involving imagination, emotions, and personal experiences. AI cannot experience all that, and it creates content on the pre-fed data. This makes AI-generated content bland, generic, and mainstream, unlike creative, manually written content that brings unique ideas and perspectives to the table.
• Secondly, AI-generated content can be misleading or inaccurate. AI relies on data and algorithms to create content, and this means that AI-generated content can contain errors and inconsistencies that can ruin your author/brand credibility. In addition, it doesn’t take the nuances of language and context, which makes the content incoherent and massively misleading.
• Lastly, content written by AI might lack originality. Tools like ChatGPT deploys algorithms to analyze data and pre-existing content for creating new content. This means that the content produced by AI is often a rehash of existing content, lacking originality and creativity.

SEO and AI-Generated Content

While Artificial intelligence has made great strides in recent years, AI-generated content can be detrimental to a website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines like Google are designed to deliver the best possible user experience by ranking high-quality content higher in search results. AI-generated content is often low-quality, repetitive, and lacks the nuance and context that human writers bring to the table. As a result, search engines are likely to penalize websites that use AI-generated content by lowering their rankings in search results. Additionally, AI-generated content can make a website appear less trustworthy to both search engines and human readers. If a website appears to be generating content automatically, it may be seen as spammy or manipulative.

AI can’t beat Human Competitors!

Entrepreneurs and marketers use tools like ChatGPT to cut costs because it’s way faster and cheaper than human writers. Imagine this: ChatGPT allows you to write unlimited words within a few seconds, so why would you pay a writer who charges $50 for 1,000 words? The answer is simple:

“If you want your content to be readable, get it written by real writers.”

AI-generated content lacks insights, personal touch, and the flow human writers can create. These drawbacks were just a scratch on the surface. Search engines would eventually devise ways to bury AI content at the bottom of SERPs, and AI cannot write content to keep readers hooked with an immersive experience.