Main AI content creation tools
Copysmith – Copysmith is an AI copywriting software used for generating marketing-related content. This content includes product descriptions, social media ads, Google ads, blog posts, and others. It is best suited for eCommerce marketing teams and large marketing agencies.
Jasper AI – Jasper is an AI writing tool for creating and improving short-form and long-form content, including product descriptions, Facebook ad primary text, photo captions, YouTube video descriptions and more. It’s the AI tool which I’ve used the most to date.
The state of AI content creation today
Agency Collective recently surveyed 64 agencies involved with content generation, of which 65% said they were already working with AI tools in some capacity, while 29% said they’ve used it in a production project.
The current leader in AI content generation is GPT-3, an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning and text scraped from the internet to produce human-like text based on 175 billion parameters. As you can see from the example below, it is capable of taking regular prompts like “once upon a time” and expanding them into fully-formed, coherent content, which can often be indistinguishable from text produced by human authors.
The all-important question for anyone considering using AI in a content generation and SEO strategy is: will Google allow it? In August last year, Google announce the launch of a new algorithm update, called the Helpful Content Update. This update introduces a new ranking signal that will negatively impact sites that publish high amounts of content with little value, are low-added value, or are unhelpful to searchers. It aims to “better ensure people see more original, helpful content written by people, for people, rather than content made primarily for search engine traffic” – including AI-produced content. Effectively, Google will tolerate AI-generated content to the extent that it is useful to users – which should be the goal of any user-facing company anyway. But will penalize it when its main goal is to manipulate search rankings.
John Mueller recently stated that “if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content… it’s still automatically generated content and that means for us (Google) it’s still against the webmaster guide.” Google can’t automatically detect content generated by AI and as such, can’t penalize it with any consistency. However, that’s not to say they won’t in the future. Ultimately, if you don’t know how to use the tool properly, you could end up generating low-quality, unreadable content that could get you penalized by Google. And even if Google lets it slide, you’re likely to see a negative impact on your website’s traffic and engagement if your AI-generated content fails to entertain the reader or provide value. So AI is not the silver bullet which some content generators may think it is.
As for the question of whether AI-generated content can be trusted, recent market insights provide food for thought. When asked “Would you trust website content that has been written by AI?”, 82% of respondents in a major recent survey said “no”. Lack of trust was especially pronounced when it came to health information (88%), news (92%) and film reviews (94%). So it’s fair to say that people don’t trust AI content when it’s explicitly labelled as such – and they REALLY don’t trust some of it.
But it actually fares well when compared against human-authored content in a blind test. In one such test, human-generated text rated slightly worse than AI-generated content in terms of trust (73% mean trust score compared to 74%), engagement (67% mean trust score compared to 69%) and knowledge (73% mean trust score compared to 77%). So it may be that the online users actually prefer reading some kinds of AI content over its cheap human-produced alternative.
A profound impact on the future of content
In conclusion, despite its obvious advantages, AI is not yet sophisticated enough to be relied on entirely for content generation. Even if we ignore the potential for disaster discussed above, it’s my opinion that AI does not make content interesting or in-depth enough to make readers stick around, and needs oversight from a communications professional – or even an entire editorial board – to keep its overall quality in line with the requisite standards.
I am not against AI, but I do believe that it has limitations at present which are likely to turn people off, and impact results and sales in certain areas. As in every other aspect of your business, laziness and overreliance on technology is guaranteed to hurt your brand and damage its perception among users. Having said that, AI is the future, and sooner or later it will change the fabric of copywriting and SEO as we know it.
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