The short answer is… it depends on where that content will be used.
Let’s take a look into when it is – and is not – ok to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write your content.
The first thing to note, in this article we’re focusing only on written content. That’s our area of expertise and we can give an honest evaluation based on experience. For images, video, and other types of content, we can put you in touch with experts that we partner with who can give you their honest advice.
For written content, it depends on how and where the content will be used as to the role AI can play.
Can I use AI to write content for my website?
First and foremost, you need to know that web content has to be unique. To be precise, every page on your website should contain 80% unique content; this includes the navigation/menu, headers, footers etc.
Why? Because there are trillions of web pages on the Internet, and the search engines are, rightly, dedicated to delivering the best user experience.
Search engine robots come into websites every few days – or every few minutes for a News site, for example, which delivers a constant stream of fresh content. These robots have to figure out what each web page is about. When someone does a search, the search engines need to know instantly which page to present. This is a huge ask!
Search engine optimisation (SEO) uses best practice techniques to make this job easier for the search engines. We can help with this, if you’re interested in SEO guidance or implementation, contact us!
Back to the explanation… if exactly the same content appears on more than one web page on the Internet, the search engines have to decide which of those pages to present to the searcher. Let’s make it easy – as they request – and make sure there is only one option.
AI can play a role in producing content for your website, with caution. We explain all in a minute.
Beware of duplicate content
Setting aside the issue of copyright, the search engines can detect duplicate content. This is when the same wording is used on more than one web page. If the search engines detect duplicate content within a website or if it appears on another website, the affected web pages can be penalised. This is not a monetary fine, instead, your page will not be shown for searches. This means that if someone is searching the web for a product, service, or information you offer, it will only be shown if the user has typed in the actual url (web address).
Why does this matter? You won’t be able to attract new visitors to your web page; only those who already know you, will find you.
AI is improving here, the latest version of ChatGPT, in particular, has made leaps and bounds in this area compared to the previous version.
How can AI help with my marketing content?
Well, AI can definitely help by generating ideas for your content and for overcoming your writer’s block. This is an area it excels at. The more specific your request, the better the results it will deliver. For marketing purposes, you might ask for a list of blog ideas for your industry. AI will churn these out for you in a matter of seconds. For SEO, you could ask AI to generate your meta descriptions. Again, what might take you an hour to produce, AI can deliver instantly.
AI is also great for producing content for keyword research, paid ads, and content for your social channels. And, of course, AI is fine to use for email marketing and print marketing, where duplicate content is less of an issue. You will still need to check the tone of the content, and check spellings as the odd Americanism slips in.
What is the downside of using AI to generate content?
At the time of writing, you will find that AI-generated content uses its own (often ‘salesy’) language, even if you ask it to mimic a tone that you give it. This will improve, the more we use AI, the better it learns. For now, it is a useful tool to give you ideas, but you will need to then tweak that content to put it into your own words or brand voice.
The biggest problem with using AI-generated content straight off the page, at the moment, is plagiarism.
What about AI and plagiarism?
Plagiarism is an issue with the content that AI produces. For now. It is likely to improve, but currently you should treat all AI-generated content as probably plagiarised. Remember, AI is scraping the Internet to populate its database, so it stands to reason that the content it holds is duplicate. Today, we asked ChatGPT-4o where it gets its content from; this was the reply:
AI systems, such as GPT-4, find and produce content based on a combination of pre-training, data analysis, and sophisticated algorithms designed to understand and generate human-like text. Language models are trained on vast amounts of text data from diverse sources available on the internet, such as books, articles, websites, and other publicly accessible written content.
We already touched on this when we talked about duplicate content, above, but what can we do about it?
Use a plagiarism checker
To be super sure that your content is not plagiarised, use AI content as a base, then rewrite it in your own words. If you don’t want to do that – after all, isn’t that the whole point of using AI, to save time – put the content into a plagiarism checker. You will probably have been introduced to these at some point in your education, when you were writing essays and assignments. And plagiarism checkers remain an important tool now. Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is one of the most popular, reliable checkers, but we’d advise using two or three checkers to make absolutely certain your content is unique.
Is AI good to use for research?
Yes. This is why the search engines have developed their own AI programmes. The more we use AI, the less we will need to search the web ourselves. Why do your own Internet search, trawling through the results delivered to you by the search engines, when AI can do it far quicker? We’ve already seen a significant movement from typing your search into a browser, to speaking to your Virtual Assistant to ask questions:
“Ok Google, what time is England playing today?”
“Hey Siri, what causes a rainbow?”
“Alexa, how old is David Attenborough?”.
Summing up AI’s place in content generation
There is still some uncertainty around AI for some people. The thing is, it’s already here, and it is evolving quickly. All the more reason to get to grips with it now and – if not embrace it – use it to your advantage.
In terms of content, use it for ideas. Use it for research. Use it for any content that will not get you into trouble for plagiarism. The more you use AI, the better you will learn how to get what you want out of it. The better AI will learn how to deliver what you want. And in time, it will become your friend.
After all that, forget AI and use us to create your content! It will be thoroughly researched, on tone, expertly written, and completely unique. For all your content needs, get in touch today.
