It’s alive! Frankenstein content is here

If the Facebook ads I’m seeing lately are anything to go by, the internet is about to be awash with crap content.

Perhaps you’ve seen the ads, too? They have headlines like “Write blog posts 10x faster with AI” and promises like “AI trained to write original, creative content”.

Claims like that ring major alarm bells for me.

Don’t get me wrong, AI can do a lot of great things and it can make our lives better (like predicting crime waves before they happen and helping us to see around corners). But it can’t create high-quality original content that will inform and entertain your existing customers or attract and convert new ones.

AI scrapes existing content from the internet and tries to create a new blog post on the same topic, based on the information it has found. By definition, what you get is at best derivative.

I found an example of an AI-generated blog post on a blog post  flogging AI-generated blog posts. Here it is:

I don’t like it, your customers won’t like it, even Google doesn’t like it

Apparently, it took three minutes for the AI to produce this blog post. For a blog post that’s meant to be selling AI-generated copy, it’s sure obsessed with Filipino copywriters.

Let’s just say I’m unconvinced by the results. Importantly, so is Google. In an interview late last month Google’s Search Advocate, John Mueller, said AI-generated content would be penalised.

“If we see that something is automatically generated, then the webspam team can take action on that,” he said. “Currently it’s all against the webmaster guidelines. So, from our point of view, if we were to run across something like that, if the webspam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.”

Google prioritises high-quality original content, so this is no surprise. The real question here is why any brand — large or small — wouldn’t prioritise high-quality content, too? Why would any business serve their customers any old crap? It certainly goes against every instinct we have as professional marketers and communicators.

The point is not to produce the content faster; the point is to make the content more effective. Scraping the internet to create a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a blog post might be fast, but it’ll never be original, or high-quality, or effective, or better than using a professional copywriter.

Did you enjoy The Write Fit?

The above is just one small part of our FREE monthly newsletter. It’s jam-packed with excellent advice, tips and news for anyone who writes for their business.

Subscribe here.