Clients are asking me over and over “is AI the answer for content creation?” “What about Chat GPT?” And I’ll say yes and no. In the short run, if you struggle to create a draft of anything that resembles good content, yes, it’s a starting point.

Many clients don’t have the time or the skillset, not to mention the love, of writing long form content. Google rewards long form content (presently) because it’s seen as “more authentic”. With AI though, all bets will be off on this being a leading metric by which to sort out things to deliver to users in search. Besides upending search, AI’s power to change content generation means, well, we’ll have so much content that may not mean much to most users that content will be less relevant.

Wait, content might be less relevant? Well, if you’re looking for a research article, you might find that the content you are served is just an amalgamation of everything else out there on the web (that’s how AI works.) If you’re looking for a thing, you will probably go to the highest bidder (somewhat similar to what you get now.) And if you’re looking for a place, that’s different search and result criteria already.  Google also knows it’s AI written and may demote posts that use AI in favor of non-AI solutions (or maybe not, we just don’t know yet.) They may use their own AI to determine relevant content and may favor original content. Chat GPT powers chatbots so they answer questions for your business – this would be very helpful for many businesses!

For most of us who are in the ‘research and find info’ businesses that deliver professional services or products around the research-and-find model, AI and chat GPT could upend who gets the search result. How do we (as end users) know your service is better? That content’s just as good and tweaked so it’s more relevant, even if the services behind it are terrible or nonexistent. 

I tried Open AI for content generation (to create some social media posts.) It does a decent job of figuring out things – I’ll say this, when I asked it to create something about sewing, it came back in about 1 second with a post. When I asked it to write a post about sailing a Lightning (a kind of sailboat), it took two or three seconds. Presumably this was to search “Lightning” – and determine what result to give me (a wrong result would have been obvious.)  I did several examples of blog post and social posts to see what came up. It’s a good starting point, but it pulls from available web content and it’s not exactly rich or expressive in its writing.

But it has potential.

And that has, at least for many, some concerns. What will AI create? Will we be able to tell AI generated stuff from not? Does it matter?

Some numbers ago, I had my identity hacked by hackers in Bulgaria. The police were useless, so I did sleuthing myself and tracked them down. Along the way, I found websites created in other business names with my content, using faked documents with my business identity – all of this was designed to set up business merchant accounts in my business name and collect money for the hackers. THIS is probably where I think the most nefarious use of this will be. The impersonation of legitimate businesses.

I think that the upside of AI will change how we find information – businesses, how-to, help and other things – which may mean that our efforts at connection may well lead us back to social media where we can find authentic connection and information. And the upside too, that we don’t have to create so much content (like this blog post!) to help our audience learn what they need to know to succeed in their own businesses.

If you want to get started with AI content on your website or blog:

WordPress has a Chat GPT that can power your chatbot with AI. For more on easy and free chatbots, with or without AI, you can check out this article here on our blog.

WordPress also has a number of AI powered blog post generator too, if you really hate to write. We can help you source one of them or you can check out this one here

And of course, you can try out AI content here: https://www.copy.ai/tools

A review of AI content generators here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ai-writers-content-generators/448782/

To see if content is AI written: try this: https://writer.com/ai-content-detector/