Content marketing is fundamental to many businesses, especially those seeking ongoing customer relationships.
Content production, however, has changed since OpenAI released ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Generative AI has made content creation faster, easier, and relatively less expensive. But that didn’t necessarily improve the content.
Here’s why.
ChatGPT 3.5 can create content faster, easier and cheaper. Is it better?
Nothing new to say
Around 2024, generative AI is not producing new ideas or even developing its own conclusions. Rather, it regurgitates the information it has indexed.
Generative AI is great for certain tasks. For example, gen-AI search results often respond to an on-site query, which is convenient for users but not for website owners.
However, enter a generative AI prompt to produce content, and you can be sure it won’t offer anything new. Instead, it will produce an article similar to everything else on the subject.
Careful prompts and editing help, but lack of originality is a fundamental problem when using generative AI for content marketing.
No reason to rank
In 2024, Google says so do not penalize websites to use AI-generated content.
However, if the content your business publishes is the same as everything else online, Google and other search engines will have no real reason to rank yours.
Search engines want to rank content demonstrating expertise, experience, authority and reliability. So, simply taking the output of a generative AI verbatim may not lead to content worth ranking.
Not your brand
A key element of successful content marketing is a consistent approach, distinct brand voice which resonates with the public.
Men’s clothing manufacturer Mr. Porter is a good example. Her blog “The Journal” publishes original profiles and clothing suggestions in a modern and opinionated atmosphere. AI-generated content can miss these nuances, leading to content that seems generic or disconnected from the brand identity.
In other words, AI might not capture your audience’s needs, preferences, and feedback the way human-created content can.
If a company has built a reputation for being a bold, strong brand that supports environmental causes, an average comp could change customers’ perceptions of the company.
Mr. Porter’s “The Journal” publishes original and insightful articles on men’s clothing, like this profile of an NFL player.
Not precise
Large language models and other AI tools regularly produce inaccuracies.
For example, in August 2023, the Associated Press published an article titled “Chatbots Sometimes Invent Things.” Is the AI hallucination problem fixable? »
“Spend enough time with ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence chatbots, and it doesn’t take long for them to spout lies,” wrote the AP’s Matt O’Brien.
“Described as a hallucination, a confabulation or simply an invention, it is now a problem for every company, organization and high school student trying to equip themselves with a generative AI system to write documents and get their work done.”
The most egregious have come more recently from Google’s Gemini and Adobe’s Firefly.
In February 2024, Gemini made headlines when it refused to produce footage of white people because it was programmed with diversity in mind. This programming resulted in wildly inaccurate imagery, leading Google CEO Sundar Pichai to send an email on February 27, 2024, ridiculing Gemini for its obvious bias.
In March 2024, Adobe’s Firefly would have produced historical images favoring diversity over truth.
Content marketers need to be on the lookout for “hallucinations” and biases.
Not your content
Copyright infringement is an emerging issue for AI-generated content, in two ways.
First, there are now legal disputes over whether OpenAI or Google have the right to train models using copyrighted materials. The New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft may be the leading example. The courts will resolve these copyright issues, but the outcome could impact the use of AI for content production.
Second, AI content generators could plagiarize. Plagiarism detection software found that around 60% of the copy produced by ChatGPT 3.5 is plagiarized, according to an Axios report from February 2024.
Content marketers should check any cop written by AIy before using it.
