By now, we have all heard about ChatGPT, which is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022 that uses natural language processing driven by AI technology to engage in human-like conversations and create various forms of human-like content.
Currently, ChatGPT can answer questions, create FAQs and answers, compose blog posts, research papers, content briefs, outlines, articles, and even write code, to name a few uses of this tool.
ChatGPT is currently free and open to the public because OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is collecting research and feedback and wants to see how it will be adopted.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, said on Twitter that ChatGPT had more than one million users in its first five days after launching and that the content is so good, sometimes it is indistinguishable from human-crafted prose.
With ChatGPT being very good and capable of creating great content, would it replace human writers, and should your brand create AI content for PPC, SEO and Social?
Let’s find out.
ChatGPTs potential use cases for SEO
With ChatGPT, marketers can perform SEO tasks faster, easier, and more efficiently. ChatGPT will not replace the need for SEO managers and leaders; however, as the models get better trained, Search marketers can optimize and create content quicker and be more efficient, which may require fewer resources. ChatGPT does have a lot of positives that can help SEOs do the following:
Pros
- Generate meta descriptions and title tags at scale.
- Create image captions, generate robots’ files and code.
- Create high quality content, including articles, blogs, FAQs and answers.
- Generate a list of relevant keywords for a topic, which can help with on-page optimization.
- Summarize content of a webpage or article which will improve content quality and readability.
- Solve writer’s block. Sometimes it can take a human time to think of new ideas and topics for content creation. ChatGPT can help streamline the ideation process and provide ideas or even draft the content.
Limitations
While ChatGPT is ridiculously good and can generate human-like copy, it is not capable of understanding the nuances and subtleties of the human language the way that we do. For example,
- ChatGPT’s content needs to be fact checked and edited because it is not 100% perfect or current.
- ChatGPT is trained on text and not user inputs, so it won’t always respond well to dynamic user inputs.
- The content needs to be checked for grammar. While the current model is testing well, and it will continue to get better overtime, the grammar is not always correct.
- If anyone asks the same question, they will get the same response, therefore content is not original and will still require a human to add that originality.
- ChatGPT does not state the source of the content and there are no built-in plagiarism tools to detect content that is not original.
- The results are sometimes inaccurate and could lead to misinformation or safety issues.
Should I create all my content using ChatGPT rather than human writers?
With ChatGPT being so good, you may ask yourself should I use it to create content instead of relying on human writers?
The answer is you can use both – if you do it the right way.
If you utilize ChatGPT and other AI content generation tools as your primary source of creating content, then you may want to do it with caution.
Google stance on automated content
Google stated that content generated using AI writing tools is against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In other words, Google views automated content as spam, which could trigger a manual penalty.
With Google’s helpful content update, content should be useful to end users. If you’re using AI-generated content that is not helpful and useful to end users, then you should proceed with caution.
Here is Google’s stance on auto generation content:
“For us these would still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning,” explains John Mueller, Google’s Search Advocate. “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. 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.”
Google’s spam policies state:
Spammy automatically generated (or “auto generated”) content is copy that’s been generated programmatically without producing anything original or adding sufficient value; instead, it’s been generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users. Examples of spammy auto-generated content include:
- Text that makes no sense to the reader but contains search keywords.
- Text translated by an automated tool without human review or curation before publishing.
- Text generated through automated processes without regard for quality or user experience.
- Text generated using automated synonymizing, paraphrasing, or obfuscation techniques.
- Text generated from scraping feeds or search results.
- Stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding sufficient value.
If you’re hosting such content on your site, you can use these methods to exclude them from Search.
Where do we go from here?
Acronym’s CEO, David Rollo says, “AI will not only be a force for good; it will be, in fact, everywhere all the time. And that’s why it’s so crucial that we make it a reliable, safe, and responsible force in our lives (personally & professionally). Thanks to AI, humanity is no longer limited – we can work smarter, faster, and better.”
In fact, AI has been around for many years and has been used in content creation for a long time. Recently with the release of ChatGPT, AI has improved and become more widely available and adopted by the public.
Early forms of AI-generated content were primarily used for news summaries and weather reports. With the advancement of technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning, AI-generated content has become more sophisticated and human-like and is now being used in a wider range of applications and virtually has the potential to enhance content generation amongst other things.
AI can help us learn how to write better, organize our thoughts better for writing, etc. Most jobs require some fluency in writing and it’s not something that comes easily to everyone – even talented writers have writer’s block. Throwing our thoughts on the
page, then leveraging AI to help organize those thoughts can be very helpful not only in the moment, but also as a tool for how to write more effectively.
As AI learns from us, we learn from it.
However, one consideration when utilizing AI-created content is authenticity. Millennials and younger Consumers want authenticity and honest commentary. It’s why they prefer TikTok. They are tired of echo chambers on social channels and AI has the potential to start curating echo chamber content.
In fact, there is a significant risk that content will become indistinguishable as more marketers rely on AI-curated copy, in the same way many websites look alike with the mass adoption of templated site design.
Therefore, it’s critical that marketers keep that human authenticity in their writing. While AI can help to make the writing process less challenging and to organize our thoughts more effectively, the human element must not be lost.
The use of AI in content creation is still in the early stages, and it is expected to continue to evolve and become more integrated into various industries. Microsoft is continuing its multi-billion-dollar partnership with OpenAI to accelerate the development of AI technology and make it accessible to everyone. ChatGPT also has a paid version which offers unlimited access to a faster version of ChatGPT, with the promise of new (paid) features on the way.
Will Google be able to detect AI content?
Over time Google will become smarter at detecting AI content but as long as the content is edited, written with accurate statements, factual and useful information, humans and machines can work together to create content, quicker, easier and faster while being useful, helpful and relevant.
There is talk that a new concept of Watermarking text will be coming to ChatGPT. This concept involves cryptography in the form of embedding a pattern of words, letters and punctuation in the form of a secret code so we can know if content was generated from ChatGTP.
Moving Forward
If your brand is using AI content and not checking to make sure that it is helpful, useful and has true and accurate information, you could potentially receive a manual action from by a manual reviewer, which could have a negative impact on your organic performance.
Google has raised alarms with the introduction of ChatGPT and according to reports from The New York Times, Google has plans to “demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year,” including unveiling more than 20 projects powered by artificial intelligence. At the moment, Google is considered behind the curve and needs to play catch up.
