You’ve probably heard a thing or two on the news about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its ability to write content—like a term paper, college essay, or even a blog post for a website.
In fact, some companies, such as Yahoo, have been using AI for the past few years to write short news articles, such as sports recaps. Several AI tools, such as ChatGPT, will allow you to enter a prompt, and in a matter of seconds, will create a halfway decent blog post.
However, all that glitters is not gold when it comes to AI writing content.
A top French university and the Seattle School district have both banned ChatGPT, and it’s assumed that many more institutions will soon follow suit.
Google has also taken umbrage to AI-generated content and issued a stern warning to webmasters—that ignoring can lead to severe consequences for your business website.
Read on to learn more about using AI for business—and what is and isn’t recommended by top marketers.
Ha Ha, You Can’t Catch Me!
Some business owners (and students) may think that AI has gotten SO good at writing that a human being might have difficulty determining what is AI-generated and what isn’t.
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
However, there are already several tech companies out there that have come up with an AI tool whose only purpose is to detect AI-written content.
As you can clearly see, this will turn into a cat-and-mouse game for quite some time.
The Google Search Team has way more money than you do—and they will invest that money in creating smarter algorithms that can more accurately and automatically detect AI-written content over time.
The Current Problem with AI
There are two inherent problems with using AI for generating business content. For starters, those who use it are tempted to let the AI program do ALL the work while they claim credit for it. The problem with this is that the ChatGPT program writes ok, but not great content.
From a business perspective, this can mean several things. For starters, you want the very best content on your website and blog to persuade the reader to take an action—such as clicking the buy button or picking up the phone to make a call.
When a professional writer reviewed the content produced by ChatGPT, he found it lacked substance, style, and persuasion. In his words, “it felt really clinical and did not persuade me to take action.” He also found many grammatical errors.
The second problem with using AI for generating business content is that Google has issued a dire warning stating that AI-generated content is against their content guidelines—and can result in a huge manual penalty.
SEO Penalties
Let’s pretend that you used AI to generate a few blog posts on your website. Without warning or even notice, Google could penalize your website—and it could be months or years before you’re even aware of it.
Google doesn’t exactly send you an email or snail mail telling you that they’ve penalized your website. A computer algorithm (or human being) simply determines your site violates Google quality guidelines and in a fraction of a second—POOF—you’re blacklisted with no warning.
What does this mean?
Simply put—Google de-ranks your website from the search results—or moves it so far back that nobody will find you or your business.
There are a few ways to check if your website has been blacklisted by Google. The trouble is that the irreversible damage has already been done by the time you find out.
You could try to pay tens of thousands of dollars to an SEO company to de-blacklist you—but there’s no guarantee they will succeed. You’ll ultimately have to buy a new domain name and get a new website.
However, if you carry over the AI-generated content from your old website to your new one—you’ll wind up getting penalized by Google all over again.
What Can You Use AI For?
The good news is that AI does have a very valuable purpose when it comes to marketing and business content. The thing is, you can’t rely on it completely to write your content.
For example, let’s say that you want to create a content calendar for the next 6 months. You can use ChatGPT to provide you with some excellent blog post ideas. It will generate many topics that you could use or that would spark a new idea in your mind.
You can also use AI to supplement your keyword research. For example, after you’ve performed competitive keyword research, hop on over to ChatGPT and ask them for keyword ideas for your particular blog topic. You may find a few that you didn’t think of before.
Dallas Content Marketing Agency
Writing effective and persuasive content is tough. While the temptation may be high to use an AI tool to write the blog content on your website, keep in mind that eventually Google will catch up and penalize your website.
At Witmer Group, we create high-quality content designed to persuade, sell, or inform. We can help you stay one step ahead of your competitors while providing you with high-quality and evergreen content for your website and blog.
Let Witmer Group help create, nurture, and grow your brand through our suite of marketing services. Contact us today for more information.
