ChatGPT has had a meteoric rise since launching in November 2022 and has dominated global headlines. Its emergence comes on the back of Jasper’s artificial intelligence (AI) writing tool. The use of AI writing software is prompting much debate about how we can and should use ChatGPT, Jasper, etc. This article will define AI-generated content, its uses, its benefits, and the concerns around it.
AI-Generated Content Defined
AI was once the stuff of futuristic sci-fi novels. It represented an idea many people didn’t think would happen in their lifetime. But AI is an integral part of daily life today. You can see evidence of AI in voice assistants, digital banking, face ID on smartphones, and website recommendations. More recently, some use it to generate content.
What Does AI Generated Content Do?
AI-generated content is any content you can produce using AI. It’s usually writing or imagery. We’ll focus on written material in this blog, although some of our points apply to both content types. Written content can be blogs, articles, social media, web copy, etc.
AI-generated content has become popular with companies because it allows them to create marketing materials quickly and cheaply, speeding up and automating their content production processes and lowering their costs.
How Does It Work?
To get started, AI generators require a prompt from a human user. The phrase can be as simple as “article about SEO,” or it can be something more complex, such as “article about SEO that provides tips on optimizing SEO for small companies.”
Once the generator has this prompt, it scans the internet for relevant information and uses natural language processing (NLP) to summarize its findings into text.
The Benefits of and the Concerns About AI Content Generators
AI content generators have developed a controversial reputation among professional content creators, especially after Google announced that producing AI-generated content to get a page ranked higher in search results would be classified as spam creation and goes against Google’s guidelines.
But is that reputation fair? While AI generators have strengths, you should carefully consider their weaknesses when deciding whether to use them. Can you use AI tools to boost your content without relying on them completely?
The Benefits
All businesses know how important SEO is for their marketing strategy, and when they use AI-generated content right, it can certainly help SEO. Because AI generators scan the internet for information, they’re very good at highlighting trending keywords that will help you rank higher in search engine results. But you should know that this tactic isn’t 100% fail-safe, so make sure you check the keywords before you publish.
AI tools can also help you become more productive. Everyone knows that creating copy takes time. Eleven Writing states that the average human copywriter can research and write a 1,000-word article in around two hours. AI content generators can do the same in minutes. Jasper AI claims to be up to five times faster than a human copywriter. So, when businesses need to create content quickly, effectively, and consistently, AI generators become very attractive.
The Concerns
While speed is important in content creation, accuracy is even more so, and this is where AI content generators falter. AI generators are only as good as the information they have access to, and one of the sources they use is social media.
Social media is famous for being a hotbed of misinformation. Software such as ChatGPT or Jasper AI doesn’t currently have the ability to fact-check content, and if you don’t fact-check it, you’ll run the risk of promoting misinformation.
Added to this is the issue of plagiarism. According to Science Times, an AI-created blog was flagged because it copied a writer’s article nearly word for word. Worse yet, the writer could do little about it. Because of the concerns about copyright infringement and plagiarism, content creators should be wary of using AI content generators.
Furthermore, good writing appeals to the readers’ emotions, and AI software can’t produce the same complexities of feelings that a human can. Compared with human-generated copy, AI-generated content can feel… robotic. Because generators essentially summarize the information they have access to, they don’t make room to appeal to emotion, limiting their usefulness in content creation.
AI generators’ grasp of language rules is another issue. The software makes many errors in punctuation, syntax, and grammar. Some AI tools, such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid, claim to help you correct proofreading errors, but these aren’t 100% accurate.
As The Economist writes, people train AI software using data from the internet that they feed into the system. People enter a large number of error-free sentences and corrected sentences so the software can learn the mistakes that humans most commonly make. But language is complex and always evolving, so AI couldn’t possibly pick up on all the nuances of language or the author’s intent.
AI-Generated Writing Versus AI-Assisted Writing
So far in this article, we’ve spoken about AI-generated content tools, such as ChatGPT and Jasper AI. These tools take a simple prompt and create copy that satisfies that it. They yield a piece of writing that you can post to whatever platform you use (we recommend thoroughly checking this content before you post it).
But if you’ve read this article and feel uncomfortable about using generators, other tools exist that can help you with the content production process rather than do it for you because, as Ryan Law explains, AI-generated writing is vastly different from AI-assisted writing. AI can generate ideas, summarize findings, automate aspects of production, and create pitches. AI-assisted writing tools are an additional tool in your writing arsenal.
Should You Use These Tools?
So, should you use AI to support your content? This is really a personal decision that you need to make for yourself and your company by considering the points mentioned above. What you should remember about these tools is that they’re just that: tools.
We don’t recommend relinquishing content creation to AI from start to finish with no intervention from a human, but that doesn’t mean it has no place in the process. For inspiration, you can use AI generators to produce ideas, create new titles, or provide quick summaries. Just make sure you proofread your AI-generated content for accuracy – factual and grammatical – before you publish your work.
Summary
With the rise of apps like ChatGPT and Jasper AI, AI content generators started gaining massive publicity toward the end of 2022. But they’ve faced equal amounts of adulation and criticism. Using prompts from a human user, the generators scan the internet for relevant information and summarize it.
These tools can help you be more productive and time-efficient, but concerns exist about their accuracy (both factual and grammatical), copyright infringement, lack of emotion, and inability to generate original ideas. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use them; rather, you should use them to assist – not execute entirely – your content production process.
Want to Know More?
If you do decide to use AI content generators, make sure that you give your writing a thorough proofread before you publish. Proofreading is a vital step in the content production process, even if you’re using generative AI to help you. For more help, we’ve put together a complete writer’s guide to using AI so you can take full advantage of this new technology.
Want help with editing your AI-generated content? Check out our AI-generated content editing services and schedule a call with our team!
