AI-generated content has been around for a long time. Various tools like Jasper.ai, Rytr, and Scalenut have been around for years. They can write content from scratch using just keywords supplied by the user.
There have been various concerns over the use of AI-generated content among netizens. One of the most talked about issues is the safety associated with using AI content. The opinions are divisive as undoubtedly like all other technologies the use of AI for a content generation has its fair share of flaws and benefits.
In this article, we will learn about the dangers of using AI for content generation for your website. But we will also discuss how to properly use AI and avoid its dangers. So, let’s get right to it.
Risks of Using AI Content
There are several risks associated with using AI content for your website. Given below are some of them.
1. Risk of Plagiarism
To understand this risk, you must know about how AI content generators work. They rely on machine learning to “train” over some given data. The data is just written works of many different humans. This dataset is huge as well. Once the model has been trained, it will generate “new content” using this data.
The thing is, the AI cannot create new data that exists outside of the training data. Sooner or later, it starts to make the same patterns and that’s where plagiarism starts coming out.
All AI content generators are at risk of this because millions of people use them every day. Plagiarized content is not good for your website because it violates search engine guidelines. So, search engines will penalize your site if you use AI content that happens to be plagiarized.
2. Non-Compliance with Google’s E.A.T
E.A.T. stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google checks all content on the web for these qualities. It checks whether the website the content is hosted on is authentic, and it checks the author itself if they are an expert. It also checks whether the author and the website are trustworthy.
The thing is AI-generated content does not fulfill the E.A.T. requirements. AI is not trustworthy, AI is not an expert, and AI is not authoritative. Since AI content does not fulfill the requirements of E.A.T. Google ranks it quite low. This is bad for your website, as it needs to be ranked quite high if it wants to generate a good flow of traffic.
3. Lack of Creativity
AI content is not creative. It is impossible for artificial intelligence to create something new. That’s because it is just creating things from stuff that already exists. It is incapable of creating something outside of the data it is trained on.
There is uniqueness in the content, and that is true. That’s because there are a lot of combinations of words and phrases in which you can say things. But AI does not say anything new.
If you expressly use AI-generated content, then your work will start to look very similar. This will make people bored and stop reading your articles. Obviously, that is not good for your website, as you want people to stay and engage with the content. If people are not engaging with your content, search engines will rank your site lower.
4. Lack of Human Emotion
Human writers are able to channel their emotions into their write-ups when it is required. Their choice of words and the vocabulary used can indicate a lot about what the author feels about a particular topic.
AI cannot really do that. AI looks at everything objectively. It weighs the pros and cons and gives an answer based on that. That works very well for things like simple articles that are just comparing things or aim to provide information.
However, some articles do require some emotion. The most common examples are articles commenting on political or social situations. If they are presented in a robotic way, they repel their readers and reduce engagement.
There are AI models that can mimic emotions, but they do not have too much variety. Their charade is easy to spot, especially when they are being used repeatedly. Since that makes your readers turn away, search engines rank your site lower in the SERPs.
How to Use AI in Non-Risky Ways
Using AI to create content may be risky, but it does not mean there is no way to utilize it in safer ways.
In this section, we are going to give you some ideas on how you can utilize artificial intelligence to improve your content without risk.
1. Use AI to Get Ideas
Now, this may seem redundant because we said that AI cannot create new stuff, so how could it create new ideas? Well, the thing is, writers don’t always need new ideas. They just need a different spin on an existing one. And that is what AI is really good at—finding new combinations of existing patterns.
So, you can utilize AI to deal with your writer’s block and get new ideas for your website content. And ideas are not limited to just titles of blog posts and articles, you can also get ideas for outlines, and headings.
Using ideas is not against any search engine guidelines. You can use the ideas and create the content yourself. Because sometimes, that’s all the writer needs, an idea.
2. Try Paraphrasing Instead of Generating Content
Using AI to create content from scratch may be wrong and risky, but nobody said anything about paraphrasing.
You can take your own content and improve it in various ways with the help of AI. AI tools such as Paraphraser.io and Wordtune can help you improve the tone, delivery, and readability of your content.
These are all things that boost engagement, and make your audience stay and read the content. This, in turn, improves the site’s SERP ranking, which is good for your site and your business.
Paraphrasing using AI has some advantages such as:
- Access to a large vocabulary
- Using powerful words in appropriate places
- Making the content easier to understand
- Time-saving
- Effort saving
Of course, you should know, not to rely too much on AI. You should only paraphrase stuff you can’t figure out alone.
3. Use AI to Summarize Your Content
AI is really good at creating summaries. That’s because it is good for finding out what is the main point of a write-up.
As a writer, you may already know, that summarizing is an important aspect of writing. It is not uncommon to veer off course when writing. Many topics are interrelated and it is easy to forget what you were supposed to be discussing and divert into a different path.
With AI, you can deal with such stuff during editing. Any part of the text that you feel is too long for its own good you can summarize with AI tools. You can just submit that part of the text to a tool such as Summarizer.org or the Paperdigest summarizer.
In most AI summarizers, you can control how long the summary is so that you can avoid cutting off too much content.
Summarizing makes your content easier to digest, and that makes it more palatable for your readers. Anything that is good for your readers, is good for SERP ranking.
4. Use it to Create Reports and Similar Content
Some tasks do not require the human touch at all such as information tables, charts, and reports. These sorts of things are actually difficult to do because of the manual labor involved.
However, AI is really good at doing repetitive manual tasks in a very short amount of time. You can use AI to compile reports, process large swathes of data, and present them in the form of graphs.
You can use graphs, charts, and reports in your website content without any risk. This is a tip that mostly applies to people who are running websites that aim to provide statistical data rather than plain information.
Conclusion
AI is a very useful technology and it has definitely made the lives of many easier. However, its application in content writing is met with mixed responses. However, website owners are only concerned with what search engines think of AI content.
Currently, it is risky to use AI content for websites as they negatively impact the SERP rankings. But in this article, we have discussed risk-free ways to utilize AI for improving your content and improving the rankings instead.
Are you interested in working with AI and data science? Make sure to get in touch!