The rush is on. You must regularly post on your blog to keep it fresh in your reader’s mind, but where do you find the time? It’s tempting to turn to generative artificial intelligence for the answers and even the content.
In this post, the supportyourapp.com team discusses whether you should use AI to create posts for your blog.
The Short Answer
We recommend not using AI to create whole blog posts. While it can write reasonably well, it’s usually quite easy to tell that the content’s not human-generated. The work is technically perfect but can contain awkward phrases and hyperbole and be a little monotonous.
Other Considerations About Using AI to Create Content
Now, let’s look at some of the things you need to think about before plugging a prompt into ChatGPT.
Quality Control
We’ve read some of the articles created by ChatGPT. They do read pretty well, it’s true. In fact, there are human writers who can’t string a sentence together as effectively.
However, there’s a big difference between writing that’s technically perfect and good quality work. And here, it’s worth remembering that ChatGPT and its cronies are still learning.
We think of machines as infallible, but generative AI is changing things.
We’ve seen texts where the bot makes incorrect assumptions. Sometimes, it draws conclusions from different references and mistakenly draws conclusions using the wrong evidence. Therefore, you have to carefully fact-check the work.
It’s also worth noting that if you do decide to use generative AI to write posts, you’ll need to carefully edit the pieces so that they flow better.
AI is great at using ten words when one will do. It’s also adept at stringing together unnaturally long sentences. In short, the copy looks good but doesn’t read well.
Uniqueness is an Issue
To understand why this is a potential issue, you need to understand how generative AI works. It scans various websites online to find the best information to match your prompt. This means that it might simply regurgitate the content from several websites.
While the information is technically correct, it’ll be similar to everything else on the web, which means that it won’t add much in the way of useful information for readers.
You’ll be better off creating new content or at least putting forward a new point of view.
Voice and Tone
You can ask AI to write in a particular way, but it’s challenging to capture your unique tone. The algorithms tend to write in a more impersonal way and may use language awkwardly. If you’re looking for a friendlier, more informal tone, you’re better off writing your posts yourself.
Legal and Ethical Concerns
Depending on the source material used to train the AI model, there may be legal and ethical considerations regarding copyright and intellectual property rights. There’s already a huge furor about the use of AI for image generation. Artists have come forward complaining that AI is stealing elements of their work.
While this is a grey area at the moment, it’s feasible that there might be other issues of this nature going forward. It might be interesting to see if the lawsuits might transfer over to written content.
Engagement and Connection
AI isn’t capable of the same type of deep thinking that humans are. It can draw insights from various sources but is bound to make superficial connections between different concepts.
If you’re using your blog to establish yourself as a subject matter expert, this could harm your reputation. It might also cause a disconnect between yourself and your audience.
How Can We Use AI?
Just because there are issues with using AI for content creation doesn’t mean it’s useless to us. Instead of relying on it completely, view it as a helpful tool. You can, for example, use it to:
- Generate topic ideas
- Create outlines
- Edit content
- Suggest image ideas
- Create a publishing calendar
If you do decide to generate content with AI, carefully edit it to make sure it reflects your unique tone. Also, fact-check the work and see if you can add information to make the articles more valuable.
How Do Search Engines View AI-Generated Content?
If you listen to companies that sell AI checkers, Google and other search engines penalize machine-written content. However, considering that Google’s latest update spoke about “content created for people” rather than “content written by people, this is untrue.
Google has always said that they’ll reward content that’s well-written and that meets the search engine’s quality standards. Therefore, if your blog uses some AI content but is still useful, you won’t be penalized.
However, you can’t use AI to generate the same schlock that everyone else does and expect to improve your page rank.
Conclusion
We’re not yet at the point where AI is ready to take over all content creation. The algorithms aren’t advanced enough for writing to pass as humans. A quick read-through will quickly tell you if the content is human or machine-generated.
Ultimately, the best approach is to use AI sparingly and with human oversight.