Over the last few years, AI has come a long way. From the clunky and obviously fake content generation of the past to the seemingly sophisticated and human-like tools of the present. The recent boom of AI art and image generators has caused a lot of heated debate, and AI writing tools are hot on their heels. As a copywriter it’s an interesting concept – will business owners move away from using real people to write their content, in favour of machines? And more importantly, will it work?
What Is AI Content?
AI content is content written by AI, or artificial intelligence. It’s essentially a form of software that can generate text with just a few prompts. Blogs, web copy, product descriptions and other marketing materials, written in seconds with minimal human effort. How futuristic does that sound?! It works by using machine learning patterns, which scrape the internet for content and tr to understand how it’s put together. So the AI will look in its database for content that matches your prompts, and aim to create content that matches it, but is completely unique.
Neat, huh?
And since AI content has been getting more sophisticated, it feels more like a real person wrote it, and not a computer. So much so that many businesses have started using it to fuel their marketing strategies. But there are 2 reasons this is a bad idea.
Googles Views On AI Content
Since one of the main goals of content marketing is to improve SEO, what Google thinks and wants is pretty important. And what Google wants is high quality, unique content. Which is not what AI creates. Even the most sophisticated AI tools churn out low quality content that can’t compare to something written by a real person. In fact, the content generated is so low quality that Google considers it spam. The search engine can detect AI written content easily, and it will penalise you for using it. Google is so against AI content that its use is against Google’s webmaster guidelines. According to an interview with John Mueller, AI written content is deemed as spam, and may result in a manual penalty by Google’s algorithms. He says:
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning. And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways.
And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.
My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
This is particularly true of Chat GPT-3 AI writing tools – the most popular AI writing tools on the market right now. It’s as cutting edge as AI writing gets and the results are impressive, but as fast as tech evolves, so do Google’s bots, which means they will always be able to detect AI content and label it as spam. So if you want any success on google, don’t use AI generated content.
Your Readers Can Tell
If that isn’t enough, your customers aren’t keen on AI content either. Even if they aren’t sure why, people can tell if your content wasn’t written by a real person. It feels ‘wrong’ and jarring somehow, with something of the uncanny valley about it. When reading it, it often feels impersonal, disjointed and simple. It rarely has any substance or critical analysis, or speaks to readers directly in a way that understands their psychology. In short, your readers see it as inferior and spammy too.
That being said, there are some ways AI writing tools can help you with your writing. They are often fantastic at coming up with hooky and compelling titles, making sure readers actually click on your content. They can also be useful for conquering ‘blank page syndrome’. Type in a few prompts into a tool like Hey Friday, and you can have an intro paragraph that you can edit and use as a launchpad for writing the full article. The key difference is that you are the one writing it! Even copywriters need a little help sometimes, and AI writing prompts can be just that.
So what do you think? Personally, I reckon we’re a fair way off AI making copywriters irrelevant, and no doubt there will be more innovations to deal with if that time does arrive! In the meantime, Copywriters remain the best way to get high quality content for your business, without having to invest a lot of time into making it happen. If you’re interested in AI content, or want to chat about copywriting in general, I’d love to have a coffee. Just drop me a line to get a meeting booked in.