It’s mid-2024, and AI is still a hot topic. Generating your own content using artificial intelligence is very accessible, and many people have done it. However, using AI responsibly is far more complex than simply typing in a command and trusting you’ll get a good result.
If you’ve decided to make use of AI to whip up some content, we’ve created this guide to help you. We want to ensure that if you do choose to use AI, you’re able to use it to produce something that’s meaningful and responsible.
What Can AI Do?
If you haven’t used a content generator like ChatGPT before, you may be curious about what it can do. It works in a similar way to Google search, in that you can input a query and receive a response. However, the outcome you get is structured like a conversation, and usually provides an answer to your query rather than a series of links with relevant content behind them.
Using AI can feel conversational, and you can have back-and-forth exchanges until you get the outcome you want. It can be used for research, data analysis and many other things as well as content generation.
What Is AI Not Capable Of Doing?
If you’ve got some experience using AI, you may have noticed that no matter what it is saying, it says it with confidence. This happens whether it’s writing something factual or something completely incorrect, so it’s important to be careful when using it. Unfortunately, AI doesn’t yet have any source of truth. Therefore, it can’t be relied upon to be factually correct. You must cross-check with other, reliable sources to ensure the information that AI has generated is true.
As well as that, many AI platforms have a knowledge cut-off point. This is because they’re trained by being fed existing content. To provide a relevant example, I asked ChatGPT 4o what the most recent data it could reliably report on was. Its response was that as of July 2024, the most recent data it can report on comes from October 2023. That leaves a gap of at least 9 months of data which ChatGPT doesn’t yet know about.
Is AI Content Bad?
Content which has been generated using AI is not inherently bad. Ultimately, much like human writing, it’s a series of words which are strung together to transfer information to the reader. However, there are plenty of arguments against using AI to generate content without human input.
Although AI can produce readable content, that’s not to say that it’s always going to be the best quality content. Ideally, a skilled writer would go back through the content and make a series of changes to improve it. AI has a habit of adding lots of unnecessary words and whimsical language, as well as making repetitive word choices. A trained eye can often spot AI-generated content without the need for detection software, simply because of its telltale quirks.
The Stigma Behind AI Content
As a general rule, most people who use AI software to generate their website content don’t really want their audience to know about it. This is probably because there is a huge amount of stigma behind it. Some people think that using AI makes you lazy, and doesn’t require any real skill. This could be true in some cases, but we’re sure there will be many examples out there of websites which are produced using the assistance of AI which took a lot of time and skill to create. Just because AI can be used to streamline the efficiency of a job, that doesn’t mean that someone without experience and expertise is now able to generate a high quality piece of content.
Those who don’t know the full extent of the skill and input required to ensure AI-generated content is accurate and readable may dismiss it as being lazy or deceitful. The truth is, now that AI is so sophisticated, when the content has been fine-tuned by a capable writer, it’s virtually indistinguishable from human writing. When this is the case, why wouldn’t a skilled writer want to save time and produce the same, high quality outcome by using the assistance of AI?
How To Proof, Edit & Review AI Content
If you’ve chosen to use AI to help you write some content, it’s good to know how to handle it. We’ve created a short and simple checklist to help you review the writing properly, and ensure you are using the software ethically.
- Read the content critically. Take notice of any errors or parts which don’t flow. Do this a couple of times and make any edits along the way.
- Research any facts and statements which appear in the content if you can’t personally verify that they’re true. Double-check that nothing is misleading or potentially harmful.
- Re read the content and ensure it flows well. If possible, get another person who is capable of writing well to read the content as well.
As you can see by the above, using AI as an assistant can save time when it comes to writing large amounts of content, but it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of content creation. You still need to curate the result that you get to ensure your AI content is accurate, readable, and above all – responsible.
Written by Alice Farley
