On this special episode of the Engaging Marketeer, I’m sharing an interview I did with one of our team at Engage Web about AI content and its dangers within your business, our Content Team Leader John Murray.
This interview was filmed for EngageWeb.Club about a month ago, so EngageWeb.Club members may have already seen this, but I wanted to share this on the podcast because I think it is really important for you as a business owner, as a marketer, as a social media professional, to hear what John’s got to say about AI content.
Here are some of the highlights of the interview, which you can see in full over on YouTube:
Darren: What sort of malicious content are you worried about with artificial intelligence?
John: At the moment it’s just quite gimmicky, but in the future it could turn into something much more serious and concerning. What if someone used ChatGPT to impersonate people, or make somebody look dodgy? Or make somebody dodgy look not dodgy? That’s more of what I’m concerned about with it, not the kind of self-awareness stuff that sci-fi people mainly go on about.
Darren: So you’re not worried about Skynet?
John: No, not really. Authenticity is more my concern. What if ChatGPT wrote somebody’s autobiography in full?
Darren: What about people who are actually using it to replace content writers? In effect, that’s replacing work that we would do and that our content writers would do. How good is that in quality and can it relied upon?
John: What you’ll notice with ChatGPT is its always grammatically correct and makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. You won’t see typos or sentences that just don’t make sense at all. Just because it’s correct grammar, doesn’t make it good writing. Some of it is quite grammatically vague.
John: There’s also Google’s stance on it which has to be considered. ChatGPT came out in October/November time last year, before that, that John Mueller guy from Google was saying that AI content is rubbish, those who use it will be penalised. Then, once ChatGPT came, Google kind of took a step back. If you look at their current guidelines, all it says is content which is unhelpful or that is created just to manipulate SEO rankings, whether AI generated or not, goes against Googel’s idea of ‘helpful content’.
Darren: What is actually a good use of artificial intelligence for writing?
John: Well if you’re struggling to come up with ideas – sometimes it’s called writer’s block – AI can be good for generating ideas to work with and getting started. Some musicians have said they’ve used it for writer’s block or they’ve said it has the potential to be used for that purpose.
Darren: Where do you see it going in the future? Not ‘in the bin’!
John: I think it needs to be regulated somehow. We need to think about why we’re doing it. What’s the beneficial use of doing it? What’s the end of goal of why we’re doing it? Is it making a better world or is it just making more nonsense?
Huge thanks to John for sharing his specialist insight and some of the things he’s picked up in his research into artificial intelligence content.
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