The introduction of ChatGPT as probably the first widespread publicly available generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool has been both a blessing and a curse.
Firstly, OpenAI triggered an AI “arms race” with Google soon after releasing Bard, and Microsoft, with their huge investment in OpenAI unleashed Copilot. Since then, virtually everything we use in the digital industries has been touted as “AI-powered”.
Secondly, unleashing such a powerful set of tools on the public has resulted in both sone amazingly creative and productive uses, as well as some very poor judgements.
When you combine the worst parts of each of these aspects, you risk ending up with an AI-powered shitshow. And that’s what I’ve experienced this week.
Now I remember the initial excitement when ChatGPT was first revealed and I was impressed by what it could do. At the same time I was also concerned. As a long-time copywriter, there was a huge threat that AI could replace all writers’ hard work with computer-generated text. So my early attitude was one of caution; Self-defensive caution, yes, but still a well-moderated and wider ranging sense of prudence.
First Impressions of AI
I saw people using AI to generate all the content for their websites. ALL the content for their websites. They wondered why they weren’t being fully indexed in Google search. Others were proclaiming that they were “killing it” with AI and generating hundreds of posts of content about which they knew nothing let alone were they experts. I was disappointed. Disappointed that it was SO easy for those without experience nor expertise to generate reams of content and disappointed that Google was flip-flopping on its approach to AI-generated content and finally seeming to fall in and allow the spammers to win.
Using AI myself I tested it on creating content for blog posts to see if it was any good. It completely made up a product name and number for a client, so I was never going to post that, and it got many things fundamentally wrong, like naming a couple of high profile MPs as having committed crimes which, when I Googled this for proof, found nothing. This was dangerous and potentially libellous stuff.
But in AI’s defence, it has created some great frameworks for blog posts that I’ve researched and expanded upon. These posts have gone live and with that human touch have flourished. I’ve also seen some excellent use of Adobe FireFly to produce images that have been an absolute revelation in terms of both creativity and usefulness – we’d never have been able to afford to get a photo shoot for the time and cost of using Adobe’s AI image tool. It’s also conducted research that I’ve had to double-check but it’s been a real time-saver.
So yeah, my first impressions of AI have been a mixed bag to be honest.
This Week in AI
This week however has shown me that, once again, like cars, guns, or an form of power, AI on the hands of the wrong people can be less than intelligent.
The first issue was that someone used AI to help them create a tool which was only supposed to take a day to build. Yet it was incorrect, constantly queried by their customer, and there was a continuous back-and-forth of queries, criticisms, updates, and round it all went. It turned out that the AI made a mistake and blind faith in that output caused at least two more days’ worth of work on the project.
The second issue was a simple job of a cheap website. Checking the site over, it was filled with AI titles, meta descriptions, and image ALT attributes. The AI was childishly literal and had absolutely no clue. On a website for a roofing contractor, AI had generated an ALT attribute that read
“A house under construction with a red roof”
That was not the case. The house was 100 years old and the scaffolding was there for the roofing company to renovate the roof and install new clay tiles. I said so much in the revised ALT attribute.
Next I worked on a website for a screeding company. It was littered with mistakes. Almost EVERY attribute was wrong.
“A room with a lot of windows and pipes on the floor”
Is what one of the tags read. Maybe that’s what a small child would say, but the picture was actually of a house extension, with an underfloor heating installed, and ready for liquid screed to be pumped in and levelled. I could tell that as a human, but the AI could not. Also, where were the relevant keywords in the first description? Nowhere. Floor is the only relevant word and not enough to help a webpage rank or be relevant. Talking about an extension, underfloor heating, and most importantly screed, well those are highly relevant.
An Overreliance on AI
And that is exactly the issue; some people have a dangerous overreliance on AI.
The fact that there’s a button or label on every website CMS, builder or tool that says “Supercharge your SEO with AI” is an absolute joke. Clicking that button may rapidly generate a title, description, or tag, but as an SEO expert with 26 years experience of optimising websites for the search engines, it’s just nonsense.
I’ve just spent two hours checking a website prior to launch and, whilst most of the body copy is great, apart from a load of typos and grammatical errors, the SEO aspect of it is just rubbish. I had to redo about 95% of the SEO work just to get the site into a reasonable shape. I probably haven’t even finished yet.
So, people should stop relying on these shoddy AI tools and actually roll up their sleeves and “do the job properly”. If anyone considers themselves to be an experienced digital professional, especially in the digital marketing and SEO realm, then they should NOT be using AI to 100% generate copy and content. A good professional will be able to create accurate and relevant snippets very quickly whereas today has proved that AI can not.
As for “it’s just filler, it can be checked in a month to see if it’s performing” is quite lazy. If you’re going to create “filler” for titles, meta, and image ALT attributes then just do a proper job in the first place and you won’t have to “do it again”.
Conclusion
All this said, there are good AI tools and good users. Be both of the latter otherwise we’re only kidding ourselves that mediocrity will suffice.
Rant over.
NB: None of this content or copy is AI generated, it’s not been written for rank or SEO, it has been penned just for fun, and the accompanying image is, yes, AI generated because I can’t access my ancient copy of Adobe Fireworks.
NBB: Since publication, I’ve seen a professional on MS Teams using an avatar instead of their real face, and someone else generate meta descriptions for SEO using AI. In both circumstances I wasn’t impressed. The meta descriptions were particularly lazy, with just one focus keyword and the rest of the text full of “word salad”. The perpetrator has since programmed better prompts, but still doesn’t get that there’s a character limit. Humans are still superior for many things IMHO.