The Director of SEO Branding at Wix contributes a brilliantly honest piece to our #seobits series outlining his thoughts on when and when not to use AI-powered content creation services.
This is Mordy’s open breakdown in full text.
How are you doing, everyone? My name is Mordy Oberstein, and I’m the head of SEO and branding at Wix. Today, I want to talk to you about when you should and shouldn’t use an AI writer, mostly from the perspectives of content generation and, I assume, SEO.
When should you consider using an AI content writer?
I’ll probably begin when you should. As a result, AI writers are excellent at summarizing data. The issue is that when you scrape the web, you have to sort of summarize, regurgitate, and spin back up in a novel way a lot of information. It might be helpful to write up a heading if you were to offer it a very short portion of text, like a paragraph, a description, or anything similar.
That’s something you’ll probably hire an AI writer to do, in my opinion. If you look at the future of content and SEO, I believe John Mueller actually suggested that you may have an AI tool or other type of technology to create the header for you. Obviously, if you want to review it, make sure it isn’t completely false or wrong, or you could want to rephrase it.
That’s all right. I believe when working at a slow and steady pace. That makes sense when you’re asking AI to go out there and get information from the larger web. That’s where I believe you’ll run into content quality concerns. Again, in a controlled setting. It just seems like a more reasonable method to employ artificial intelligence.
Another option is if you’re stuck writing anything and want to rephrase it. You come up with a fresh concept, or you simply have writer’s block, whatever it is. That is another use for an AI writer. I know you include it in their AI writing helper product.
You are the one who is the recipient of the stuff that it retrieves from GPT3. It provides you with a variety of possibilities so you can, come up with a new method to express what you want to say but aren’t saying. I’m very certain that’s what Microsoft intends to do with the ChatGPT integration’s Open AI.
You can use programs like Microsoft Word and others to edit a small section of text so that you can continue writing if you get stuck. That sort of stuff, “little control” as a motif, “small controlled zones,” makes sense in my opinion.
When Will Your AI Written Content Fail?
Where you’re going to run into a problem is if you’re going to look at AI as a way of replacing writing content.
That will be a total disaster for you in the short run. Yeah. You’ll see web pages, as I recall, with content and the bank rate. They’re ranking, First, it appears that the text was plagiarised, or was allegedly plagiarised. I’m not sure if that was on purpose or not.
Most likely, not on purpose. It extended the material. That’s exactly what it was. But, putting those concerns aside, sure. in a nutshell. In the long run, you might be able to rate that type of material. Google will have to work this out. I don’t mean it’s the most popular opinion.
It has to figure it out or perish, and I don’t just mean Google. I mean, search engines are going to have to figure this out or die. There are already countless articles. There has been a lot of discussion about Google results getting worse and worse and worse. There are several reasons why I believe this.
I don’t think the results are getting worse. I think there are a lot of reasons why we think they’re getting worse, which is a totally different conversation for a totally different time. But it has to do with what I call the content incentive cycle, and that’s something entirely different. However, Google’s going to have to figure it out because people are going to be looking at the content.
People will look at the AI material and say, “This isn’t amazing, because it’s not fantastic,” if it continues to rank. And I want to draw a distinction from it. When you go as a content producer, it’s incredibly fantastic when you say, Hey AI, whatever, send me an email to say, happy birthday to my colleague, and it writes.
Like, it’s pretty good. That’s pretty impressive. That’s one perspective. Consider it from the standpoint of the person receiving the email. So you think to yourself, wow, this is really novel. It’s spun this thing up. It’s really good. I can’t believe it did that so well, now look at it from the perspective of the person receiving it: is it personalized?
Do they really feel like they know you from that? Is it really that good? Is it really that natural, or is it passable? They’ll probably look at it like, “That’s kind of a weird email.” So there are two different points of view. One is the amazement—radical amazement—at what this technology can do. And then, from the perspective of the person, I’m not interested in technology; I don’t care about technology.
How does AI Content “Fail To Amaze”?
I’m not even in that ballpark, let alone in that state of mind. I merely want the “flesh”. That’s a totally different perspective and structure to have. Looking at the content from that perspective, the AI stuff is, well, poor. It’s not really good content. Even if everything is correct, there is something missing in it that people would notice.
And if Google continues to serve such results to users, the uproar will grow. Is Google getting worse? It’s only going to increase. In other words, the problem that Google has been facing, I would say, or not facing, but dealing with, I’d say, since 2018 in a significant, let’s say, focused way, is the fact that there’s plenty of content out there, but there’s a content shortage in terms of quality content.
The gap between having enough quality content and having just enough content is only going to increase exponentially as people use AI writers and people are going to use them because AI writers suffer really, really, really, really significant pain points. I see it all the time. People I talk to on the WIX side, Writing is really hard, and I say to someone, I come from a content point of view.
I got into SEO because I was a writer beforehand. Writing is not easy. I used to practice my cr. I used to practice writing since I was a teenager. Just practice writing. It’s a knack and it’s hard and it’s time-consuming, and that’s even more so if you’re not good at it or not experienced in it, it’s even more time-consuming.
However, everyone is aware that you must have the content. People will therefore reflect, “Wow, I have this extremely powerful pain point.” It’s difficult to write content, especially good material. Writing material is not my strong suit. I have the time to compose articles. These issues are all resolved by AI authors, but they are all false.
However, to the typical human, an AI writer would appear to solve this. And it’s pretty common, as you can see. Marketers are flocking to them, I don’t know how to characterize them. I’ll refer to them as a second-tier market. Isn’t that offensive? That’s OK. Second-tier marketers are going out and talking to the general public, telling them that AI writers are the next best thing.
You’ll spin up content. You’ll now have content for your website. These site owners are thinking, “Wow, that really solves a major problem for me,” and they’re going to adopt these AI writers like they’re hot cakes like they’re going out of style. The problem is that if Google starts incorporating this stuff into the results, which it will inevitably do until it figures it out, the quality of the results will suffer, and people will be even more upset than they already are.
If Google wants to survive, it’s going to have to figure out a way to do it too. When I say, “Do it,” figure out a way to understand when that AI-written content is (a) AI-written and (b), when the Al-written content is appropriate or InApp, and what that’s going to mean is that in the long term, the air-written content, the general fluff, is going to spin up but is not going to rank in the long term.
So you might see some immediate benefits, and then you’ll have something, I’m not sure if it’s a pantomime or a slow burn with beneficial stuff or anything. Inevit, on the other hand, will fall off. It needs to be. And the technology is already available. There have been a few patents that have alluded to the notion that Google can.
Determine when the content is written. You have stuff like the helpful content update, which I believe is Google attempting to foresee the impending reality of a world filled with spun-up AI-written material. It’ll figure it out eventually. Things will eventually figure themselves out. It’s going to be an issue.
So I would advise you to avoid it or use it cautiously. I relate AI written behavior to opium. Opium is a drug. It is employed in morphine and other medicines when used properly. I’m not sure whether it’s truly morphine. It’s most likely used in morphine. I’m not a doctor, therefore I’m not sure. However, it is employed in painkilling medications, which are extremely significant in conventional medicine.
It’s also a really bad drug. They get you addicted and ruin your life. An in-content is a little bit facetious, it’s sort of like that. It is, and if used responsibly in a closed context, as I mentioned before, it could be really helpful for SEO. It could help you write a title tag. It could help you write a heading.
It could help you do tons of things with that keyword. I know the latest to the whole post about this really helping me do keyword research. I’ve used it to sort of understand entities better. So for one example, I’ve used it for, I wanted, I don’t remember the exact example, like party planners, entities related to party planners and chat.
Chat GPt spun up a whole list of entities and, rather topics because concepts are entities. And I love the fact that it went conceptual with it and spun me of a whole bunch of concepts related to parties. It could be really good for those sorts of things. It has to be used responsibly in a limited closed context.
If you go full throttle with it, you may experience quick success, but you will be devastated. I believe at a later date. It’s unavoidable that it will have to happen again. Google will figure it out, or else Google as an ecosystem will cease to exist. So, in my honest and humble opinion, what you’re attempting will not be effective in the end.
| When to Consider Using AI Content Writer |
|---|
| – When summarizing data |
| – To write up a heading for short texts |
| – To rephrase the content |
| When AI Written Content Will Fail |
| – When used to replace writing |
| – When it lacks the personalization |
| – When quality is poor |
And that’s all I’m gonna say by written content. If you got any questions about it, wanna reach out to me? I’m on Twitter @MordyOberstein