Gen AI’s ability to whip up content for your website can be seductive. But behind AI’s speed and efficiency lurk dangers that can fatally undercut your digital presence.
As marketers and content creators, you may be enticed by the idea of using AI to easily generate website content. AI tools can produce dozens of pages of content on a wide variety of subjects in mere minutes, saving on resources. But faster isn’t always better.
When it comes to AI generated content, like so many other things in life, an all-or-nothing attitude is not the wisest approach. While AI tools can support your content creation efforts, relying too heavily on them can be dangerous for your rankings and even your brand’s reputation. Using AI alone with no human input produces thin and lifeless content that may contain embarrassing inaccuracies and cause your site to lose rankings.
However, that doesn’t mean that it’s all bad. AI can be a handy tool when used properly in content creation. Of course, AI has a vital role in the world – automating tasks, supporting data analysis and much more – and is tremendously helpful and transformative. But let’s consider the risks of over-dependence on AI generated content on bank and credit union websites, and how to take a balanced approach that will benefit your institution and visitor goals.
AIs have limited knowledge
You might reason that an AI can do a better job writing content than you or your team because it’s got the whole internet indexed, right? Not quite. While AI’s have access to huge stores of data, they also have a knowledge cutoff date when the AI model stops learning new information. This means AIs are limited in how much they know, and certain models may not be up to speed on recent events and new developments which can make your content, and your organization, sound like you’re out of the loop.
Remember too that AI isn’t perfect, it can make mistakes like drawing the wrong conclusions or using unreliable sources that a human would recognize as faulty right away. The takeaway? Use AI as a starting point for your content but continue to use your own brain and talent as you did before AI came out.
Your brand could lose its humanity
When no humans are involved in your writing, you risk losing the individual voice of your brand. This can especially be an issue on blogs, financial literacy content and landing pages which should represent your brand’s unique voice.
Like anyone can put two bucks in a vending machine to get a candy bar, AI tools are designed to spit out content without any regard for who’s receiving it or what they will do with it. AIs only look to match related facts and information to a certain subject; they don’t consider the human needs, challenges or feelings of the audience that will consume that content. And while you can ask for content in a specific voice or tone, this still isn’t uniquely yours.
The result is that AI-generated content often lacks flavor. A human author can use a little humor, personal experience and interesting anecdotes to illustrate a concept and bring a point home to the reader. But AIs are not often equipped with the critical thinking and human sensibilities needed to construct these nuances in their writing.
Especially when touching on sensitive topics, relying solely on AI can misrepresent your brand and potentially get you into trouble. AIs lack the empathy and moral compass of a human writer and can fail to show respect for the different perspectives and backgrounds of readers. The outcome could be language that oversimplifies complex issues or employs terms that are outdated and possibly offensive.
There’s nothing new in AI
The more content creators and marketers rely on AI to write their content, the more homogenized it becomes. AI is learning from existing data so it’s regurgitating things that people have already said and repeating well-known conclusions drawn by somebody else. While there’s nothing wrong with exploring the known facts and background of a topic in your content, AI content can end up telling the same old story rather than providing a fresh, informative take on it that tells the reader something new. To remain authentic, your content must offer original ideas combined with human insights that make it worth reading.
AI content doesn’t compete well
For most institutions, the goal of your content writing efforts is to compete in the SERPs, drive traffic to your website and keep visitors informed and engaged. It could be tempting to head to a tool like ChatGPT and let it rip so you can copy and paste a whole bunch of AI generated content onto your website, but this is not the way to boost traffic. Quantity doesn’t mean quality and high-quality content is what Google is looking for. So, when Google compares generic AI generated content with content offering an undisputed human touch, they will always pick the latter.
Google’s EAT guidelines make it clear that they favor useful, people-first content that provides a fresh perspective on a subject. Generating AI content might make for a quick check off your to do list, but it doesn’t contain the personal touches that only come from a human point of view.
You could violate Google’s guidelines
Google’s guidelines on AI-generated content make it clear that they’re perfectly ok with AI being part of the content creation process, as long as the goal is to produce helpful, original content. Trying to use AI as a quick and easy way to manipulate rankings is considered spammy and against their scaled content abuse policy. Examples of scaled content abuse include “Using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users”. So, a site that makes a habit of using exclusively AI generated content is at risk of violating this policy and taking a nosedive in the rankings.
AI Tools should Support Human Efforts
AI tools are a cost-effective way to get inspiration and fine-tune your content creation efforts, but they should not be doing the whole job for you. It doesn’t pay to sacrifice authenticity in your content just for the sake of having more of it. So, use AI tools to identify the well-established basics of a topic and pop in some good keywords but use humans to ensure your content is truly reliable and valuable.
Source: The Financial Brand
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