Last Updated on January 26, 2022
Some content creators might feel a sense of dread over AI-written content and the possibility they might become obsolete one day.
Artificial intelligence may someday populate blogs — and even newspapers and other news-related sites. But would you really consider turning to AI-written content for your site?
Artificial intelligence supposedly created a recent article The Guardian published.
The article, written from a “robot’s” point of view, seeks to ease the minds of us mortals. That’s despite the headline, “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?”
I read the article. This human doesn’t particularly feel frightened at the moment.
Over at Build a Wellness Blog, Chrissy Carroll writes that artificial intelligence can help a blogger produce content five times faster. Many of the AI-written content pieces rely on something called GPT-3. Carroll explains it’s an “autoregressive language model” developers introduced just last year. For bloggers, the idea is a computer would craft an article in a human voice.
Except that it can’t because it doesn’t have a human voice to begin with.
“You might give the AI writer a content description of what you want it to write about, press compose, and then let it go!” Carroll writes.
That sounds amazing, doesn’t it?
I want to publish a blog post about X. But I don’t feel like writing it. So I’ll just let a machine write it in a style that mimics what a human writer might compose. Then I’ll publish and hope you won’t notice.
I hope you read that as my being facetious. It doesn’t sound amazing. I hope no blogger believes otherwise.
In August 2020, a college student heard about GPT-3. He used it to create a fake blog with AI-written content. But a funny thing happened during his little experiment.
MIT Technology Review reported one of the posts took the number one slot on Hacker News. People even began subscribing.
No one, apparently, noticed a human hadn’t actually written the blog posts.
But their ability to fool the reader isn’t the point.
One of the most important things a blogger should be, whenever possible, is authentic. If you employ computers to write your content for you, you have two immediate choices.
The first would be to fess up. Tell your audience from the start that you didn’t write your own blog’s post. If you’re upfront about it, some of the people who’ve come to follow you may skip that post. Now you’re hurting your blog’s stats. Will you actually do that?
Would you go to a site and read a post if the site told you right away that a human didn’t write the post? I doubt it. I wouldn’t.
The second is to keep the post’s origin on the down-low. You present it without comment as if you wrote it. No, you aren’t saying you actually did write it. But you aren’t acknowledging that you didn’t, either.
You may believe that what your audience doesn’t know won’t hurt them.
But you might consider that what they find out later could hurt your credibility. No one wants to feel they’ve had the wool pulled over their eyes.
If you’re publishing machine-written content as your own without presenting as machine-written content, is that being honest?
I’d never feel right about doing things that way. Maybe I’m overthinking it. I just don’t think I am.
When I need a computer to craft my content because I’m too busy or too uninterested in the subject matter to create it myself, that might be the sign I’d need to say it’s finally quitting time.
Always interesting to hear from others on this topic. I find AI a helpful tool – almost akin to spellcheck – something that’s helpful for a writer but certainly doesn’t replace one. I find that it can allow you to get a base of an article fleshed out quicker (particularly SEO-focused writing) — and then you can then add your thoughts, weave in research, polish it up in your voice, etc. In my opinion, if it helps the reader, that’s all that really matters. But I know others will disagree – as you do – and that’s fine too. Everyone… Read more »
Thanks for your comment, Chrissy, and how nice of you to stop by. I can definitely see how it might be a good resource in assisting a blogger. Even using it to start the basics and build upon that foundation into your own pieces…well that’s a very different thing from the problem I’m starting to see. I fear that some bloggers might be a little too tempted to just post entire pieces written by AI as if to say, “See, we can just do this now.” Or worse, to just post them without acknowledging the “assistance.” That’s where I’d have… Read more »