“Content is king” is not just an outdated adage embraced by aging marketing professionals. In reality, content still drives everything, especially engagement—that vital element necessary for creating meaningful, lasting relationships—and more importantly sales. However, with so many companies vying for an increasingly shortened attention span in a marketplace crowded with content, it has become challenging for organizations, especially new entrants, to break through the noise and reach their target audience. It has also become difficult to find talented writers to generate enough relevant content to stay top of mind. Because of this, many companies have turned to AI (artificial intelligence). After all, it’s free, and it’s fast. But could AI-generated content be doing more harm than good?
AI’s Downfalls
Before relying too heavily on AI-generated content, companies, especially those targeting the hard-to-engage C-Suite, should be aware of the many downfalls.
- Originality. For sophisticated readers, AI-generated content is pretty easy to spot. There’s a cadence that seems repetitive from piece to piece: An introduction that makes any topic sound a little too profound, followed by a paragraph or two explaining why the topic is important, followed by a paragraph or two discussing the issues that need to be solved, followed by a paragraph or two on how to solve them. Then there’s the closing that just reiterates the intro.
- Trustworthiness. You’ll also notice that AI-generated content doesn’t provide sources for where its information was pulled, which means it could be outdated or completely inaccurate. While ChatGPT was initially trained on approximately 45 terabytes of data, there’s nothing to stop it from being fed fake content, intentionally or unintentionally. Without sources, it’s nearly impossible to tell. In short, it can’t be trusted.
- Plagiarism. Using other writers’ content is acceptable only when properly treated and cited, giving full attribution to its source. So, is it plagiarism when ChatGPT pulls content from what’s already written, repackages it, and presents it as a new piece of content? For most universities, the answer is yes. However, for many businesses, it doesn’t seem to matter. However, that may soon change.
- SEO Demotion. For those who may not be aware, Google can detect AI-generated content. While that doesn’t in and of itself disqualify it from SEO rankings, Google can also detect poor-quality, SEO-first content. In an interview with Search Engine Roundtable, Duy Nguyen, a member of Google’s search quality team, said, “Scraping content, even with some modification, is against our spam policy” and that the company uses special algorithms to identify the practice. If found, the result is SEO demotion.
Companies that use AI-generated content are putting themselves at risk of SEO demotion, making “free” content quite expensive.
- Brand Impact. Besides SEO demotion, AI-generated content can also harm a company’s brand reputation, primarily for what it’s missing: Relevance, original ideals, meaningful insights, and thought-provoking, intelligent viewpoints. Think about visiting an art gallery where all the paintings are replicas of original artworks with just a few tweaks here and there. The gallery offers nothing new—just recycled artwork that’s been repackaged in different ways. How many poor-quality replicas of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers would you need to see before you stop visiting the gallery? Not many. How many irrelevant AI-generated blogs would you have to read before you stop engaging with a company? Not many.
Protecting Your Company From AI
In an age where prospective buyers have more choices than ever when acquiring solutions or services, the competition for attention has become fierce, making engagement increasingly difficult. While the use of AI in content creation is evolving, at this time, the downfalls could outweigh the benefits.
For companies seeking to create valuable, lasting customer relationships, it wise to stick with seasoned human writers, professionals with the ability to create original, relevant, intelligent content and customize it in a way that promotes trust and action.
If the majority of marketers turn to AI to create content, it won’t be long before the majority of content out there is stagnant and irrelevant. And so will the companies that rely on it.
