As Artificial Intelligence continues to garner attention from the media and tech entrepreneurs, more clients are asking us whether they should use AI-generated content for their blogs.
What is AI-generated Content?
Simply put, AI-generated content is any content that looks like it was written by humans, but instead, was actually created by Artificial Intelligence. AI-generated content can be used for web page content, including blog posts, social media posts and more.
How does AI-generated content work?
In order to create content using AI, one must first enter some information such as relevant keywords or topics, and sometimes even URLs of websites that have related content.
The AI content generator, will then search the web and gather some content from various sources (i.e. other websites that have the content in question), and from those sources, create its own content.
Benefits of AI-generated Content
Saves Time
Obviously, the primary benefit or allure of content generated by artificial intelligence (software) is that it saves time when compared to having a human having to write content. That is because AI can create content in minutes that might take a human, hours to write.
Saves Money
Paying a human to write high quality, “expert” level content for your blog can cost up to hundreds of dollars per post. Now compare that to AI content generators which can cost as little as $10-20/month to generate a few thousand words, or some free AI content generators.
However, free AI “content generator” tools often have much greater limitations on the amount of content that can be generated. This gives you the opportunity to test the tool and if you like it, you can always pay a monthly subscription fee (as noted previously) to be able to generate more content.
Problems with AI-generated Content
Just because AI could make your life easier (in terms of not having to write content yourself), it does not mean that it is better for your website visitors. In fact, most AI tools available to the general public, are far from perfect, especially the free ones.
So, here are a few drawbacks from using AI-generated content.
Plagiarism/Quality Issues
One significant problem with AI-generated content is that it uses existing content from numerous websites that is then reconfigured (reworded) into “new” content. This newly AI-generated content may be viewed as too similar to the content sources from which it was derived, thus being deemed plagiarism (duplicate content).
Lacks the Human Touch
AI-generated content may be considered by readers and search engines alike, to be boring or unusual in its flow when reading. Why? That is because AI-generated content was not written by humans, but instead, generated by software, which lacks that human touch, making it seem at times, unnatural.
What Does Google Think About AI-generated Content?
Google does not penalize content written by AI, per se. Rather, Google is focused on the content itself. In fact, search engines such as Google, look for unique, relevant, good quality content that is interesting and informative to the end user or website visitor. When your blog post contains content that is determined to be of low quality, or even worse, plagiarized/duplicate content, it may not be indexed by Google or other search engines.
So, Should You Use AI-generated content for your Blog?
We recommend against using AI-generated content from both an SEO and UX perspective. Based on our experience, the best web content is that written by humans, not AI.