Can I Use ChatGPT to Create Content for My Website?
Robots are the writers of the future? Not so fast
Edit 3/28/23: As predicted, the thinking is changing rapidly on ChatGPT and generative AI for content creation. We’re updating this blog post to reflect the current stance of Google and others. This post will continue to receive updates as changes are made to policies.
Currently, Google has stated that it will not devalue or penalize AI-generated content as long as the content demonstrates the same helpfulness of human-written content. This means it needs to demonstrate expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. As long as the content is helpful, well-written, and can demonstrate these qualities, Google has said that it will treat this content like any other.
I was born in 1981. This places me in the “Xennial” Generation where I’m on the cusp of Gen X with one foot in the Millennial Generation. Yes, we were the first generation to live with and without Internet technology, and I do have a fairly good recollection of what it meant to not have the Internet, smartphones, or social media.
Dreaming of a Brilliant Future
I also remember the promise of technology’s future and how we were all excited at the prospects. Flying cars (or hoverboards as in the case of “Back to the Future Part II”), automated homes, and space exploration all seemed like they were going to either have humanity colonizing other planets by the fabled year 2000 or we’d be living in a nuclear dystopia a la Terminator 2 and Skynet.
The good news is that Skynet hasn’t taken over (yet), but the bad news is that we aren’t living on Mars either. We do have home automation, even if it’s somewhat finicky, and I have seen some neat electric skateboards, but they weren’t hovering.
The “future” seems to have come, but it isn’t really as exciting as many of us had hoped. Perhaps this is because of how time passes slowly, and humanity adapts to big changes without noticing just how much things have changed day by day.
Good content is valuable content
What is Good Content?
I had a conversation this morning with a business owner who works with retail marketing strategy out in California. We were talking about digital content and what defines “good” content.
He noted how we allow brands like Google to define what is good and what is not, and this got us on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT. He was of the mindset that AI technologies could be used to generate content or rewrite existing content for the purpose of gaining rank.
I’m a little less optimistic about this idea. Can you use ChatGPT to create content? Does Google penalize ChatGPT content? If you use AI-generated content, does Google know? More importantly, do your customers know, and do they care? These are all good questions, and I think it’s important to address them before you take a massive gamble on your brand’s future.
AI and automation are getting smarter and more humanlike
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot technology from OpenAi (now with a heavy dose of Microsoft infused) that can provide answers to questions as well as perform actions based on user commands. It sounds simple, but it’s pretty darn “smart”.
One way to leverage this technology is to ask it to write content. People across the web have marveled at ChatGPT’s ability to spit out content about a huge variety of topics in seconds, and many have even begun using this technology to write content for their websites, social media, and more.
This futuristic helper seems like it’s a dream come true – you don’t have to research or write the content yourself, and what can take hours or even days can now be boiled down to a minute or two of your time. This is good news for your content marketing efforts, right?
Well, not so fast.
Google Isn’t Going Anywhere
The issue is this: Google isn’t going to let this slide.
Google’s entire revenue model is based on advertising. You may think Google’s products like its search engine or Google Maps are free, but they are paid for through advertising. Every single search that gets performed has the potential to earn money for Google, and the data you give up through the use of products like Google Maps, newly-acquired Fitbit, and Nest products provides Google with valuable data that can be used by the company or sold to third parties.
The point is, Google makes a lot of money off of data and advertising, and ChatGPT is a direct threat to this. If people turn to chatbots for answers to questions, Google doesn’t get the search traffic, so Google can’t show ads.
To complicate matters, If Google can’t provide relevant search results because everyone is using AI-generated content across the web, people stop using Google.
If the Internet becomes so clogged with content that is written by bots that are scraping info and spewing out copied or spun content, Google can’t make any money because the entire fabric of the web falls apart. Its search results become completely irrelevant because they can’t be trusted.
It’s just robots talking to robots at a certain point. Bots write the content for other bots to then search. These bots then spit the content back out to users. There’s a singularity in there somewhere at which point there’s no reason to use the Internet at all.
Google maintains content should be by humans, for humans
What is Google’s Stance on AI-Generated Content?
Edit: Google has updated its policy. As long as content is helpful, useful, and adheres to expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness, Google has stated it doesn’t care if content is AI-generated.
Google has already stated that it devalues AI content (that doesn’t value) and that a component of high-value content on the Internet is that it is written by humans, for humans.
The company has had a number of high-profile algorithm changes in recent years to reflect this, and in the content marketing and SEO industries, we have been well aware of changes made by Google on this topic (the company practically owns the Internet, so it’s kind of important for us to keep up with this stuff.)
What I cautioned during my conversation this morning is the same advice I pass along to everyone with whom I discuss this topic: you can take chances if you want, but the science is not settled on how AI content will be treated in the future.
This means that if you fill your site and blog with AI-generated web pages, blog posts, thought leadership papers, case studies, and more, you may find out in a few months that your content is suddenly holding your brand back.
What Could Go Wrong?
If you create a host of pages and blog posts created by AI and Google suddenly decides to penalize all sites using this content, you may end up spending months or longer to dig yourself and your brand out of that hole.
Penalties and the ramifications of penalties by Google can take a long time to resolve, and on top of that, you’re going to lose all of the content you thought you had only to start back over at square one. This means spending the time and/or money you thought you had saved in the first place.
My advice? Don’t risk it. You may get away with it for a little while, but it’s not going to last, and Google has already drawn a line when it comes to how it views AI content.
ChatGPT is clever, but it could send your website content the wrong way
ChatGPT Makes Mistakes
The other glaring issue with AI-generated content is that it isn’t perfect. Countless demonstrations have proven that ChatGPT and similar technologies make glaring mistakes. Remember, this technology is only “writing” content from datasets.
It isn’t creative, it isn’t nuanced, and it doesn’t have ideas of its own. It merely takes information from a database and compiles what it thinks makes sense based on a language model. In a sense, it’s guessing what should come next in a series of words based on what it has been trained to think is true.
In fact, to call it AI is a bit disingenuous. Yes, we can argue over the definition of true AI and what is AI vs. AGI (artificial general intelligence) is, but right now, this technology is not thinking.
As such, the quality of AI-generated content is an issue. Playing around with ChatGPT, for instance, you can clearly see the limitations and the quality of content that comes out. It produces convincing results, and it’s great for fast research and data compilation; however, it isn’t able to produce engaging content.
This is where it falls apart in your content marketing strategy. If you want people to actually read your content, engage with your brand, and use your content as a stepping stone on the customer journey, ChatGPT ain’t gonna’ cut it.
If you plan to use this approach, you’re highly encouraged to edit any content you receive from an AI source. This means editing for grammar as well as factual correctness.
In addition to Google placing emphasis on original and unique content, the company also places emphasis on quality. Content that contains factual errors, grammatical mistakes, typos, and so on can and does get devalued.
Getting your facts straight plays a vital role in quality digital content production
Why Facts Matter in Search Engine Ranking
Search engine results pages (SERPs) also rely on a consensus of information to create feature snippets. These are the search results that often appear at the top of the list of results in bold when you type a question into a search box.
These feature snippets are chosen because a search engine has compared the answer provided against answers provided elsewhere. If the consensus is that a particular answer is accepted as correct from multiple authoritative sources, it gets chosen for the feature snippet. From there, other ranking factors determine which page gets chosen as the actual feature snippet.
AI-generated content that gets facts wrong can hurt rank in this process since Google and others will potentially view the source as untrustworthy – not just the AI-generated content, but the source (i.e. your website) as a whole. This can damage your other ranking factors as well and cause a massive headache for your content marketing efforts going forward.
Essentially, if you use AI to generate content and it includes information that isn’t factual, you could be jeopardizing your entire site’s rank, not to mention your company’s reputation. Again, this is a big gamble, and we don’t know how things will play out.
We do, however, know that purpose-driven, human-written content that demonstrates expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness is the way to go.
Plagiarism is Another Issue
Something else that stands in the way of ranking through AI-generated content is plagiarism. Remember, AI-generated content is merely piecing together data that it finds elsewhere.
Human writers do this too, but each writer has his or her own voice, style, approach, and tone. An AI writer is going to regurgitate information based on grammatical rules without thinking about how it sounds to the reader.
This can result in plagiarism since AI isn’t “thinking” of ways to rephrase a point or add something to it, and Google definitely devalues copied content even if there isn’t an outright penalty.
Over time, this is an inevitability with AI-generated content because again, at a certain point, it becomes bots copying bots copying bots. Left unchecked, this destroys the Internet as a whole because content no longer holds any value, and content is what makes up the Internet.
It would take a long time for this to happen, but it’s impossible for it not to happen if AI does all of the content creation. Bots would end up just feeding off of one another, but because AI doesn’t have original thoughts, it becomes a never-ending loop of copied content that provides no value to anyone other than more bots. Who is consuming this content? More bots.
This then raises the question of copyright. Getty Images is already suing because AI art programs are alleged to have used copyrighted works to generate new images, and we can see the same thing happening down the road with written content.
If your business gets sued for copied content due to ChatGPT, where does the blame lie?
If your site’s rank gets obliterated because your website contains a ton of AI-generated content that is plagiarized, where do you turn for financial relief? These are things to consider in both the short-term and the long-term.
Hands-on experience makes all the difference when creating valuable digital content
AI Has No Experience
Another reason AI-generated content is a problem for ranking is that AI has no experience. It can mimic life experience, but it has no actual lived experiences.
It can’t share an anecdote or create a metaphor. It can fake them, but they’re pretty obvious. It is raw data, cold and calculated. As recently as December 2022, an update was made in which Google reaffirmed its commitment to EEAT as the standard for ranking content and SEO. Until AI is sentient, it’s not going to be able to truly fulfill these parameters.
Should You Use AI-Generated Content?
At the end of the day, AI-generated content holds a lot of promise for quickly putting together information that would normally take a long time to research and write. The potential for this technology is immense, much like Stable Diffusion and AI-generated art.
When it comes to website content designed to generate leads, engage customers, and drive website traffic and conversions, we once again think that anyone using this approach is taking a huge risk that could be very detrimental in the coming year.
We’re not saying don’t do it, but if you choose to use AI-generated content, you need to watch your analytics very closely and be ready to take swift action. You’re also highly encouraged to edit and add to any and all AI-generated content to put your brand’s pin on things to avoid penalties.
Contact Charlotte Content Marketing to Learn More About Getting Genuine Quality Content That Aligns With Your Brand in Charlotte
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