The Rise of AI-Generated Content: Challenges and Opportunities

Intro

You will have read this question often: Is AI content garbage or the next best thing for content creation since Upwork?

The answer is complicated because it’s kind of both. Depending on how you use it, it can present challenges and benefits to your SEO practices.

One thing that nobody can argue about is that AI-generated content is popular. Really popular. In fact, most industries utilize it for images, blog articles and even music. The opportunities it offers are fast content to specifications set by the user, but some of the challenges include quality and authenticity.

Enterprise AI is another interesting part of this picture because it offers AI specifically for enterprise-size companies, using business-specific jargon and massive scaling.

This article explores the challenges and opportunities of AI-generated content so you can make an informed decision about whether it’s right for you. And if you use it, you will now be aware of how to mitigate the limitations while reaping the benefits.

What Is AI-Generated Content?

AI-generated content is usually made by LLMs (large language models). These models appear sophisticated, but they’re pretty simple and not creative at all. They collect and store massive amounts of data, which humans couldn’t do, and then use the data to combine it in ways the user asks it to.

So if you ask ChatGPT, “Write me a clever slogan including beavers for my construction business,” it will combine what it knows about beavers, clever slogans, and construction. What it can’t do is be creative, as only humans can do that. So far.

Businesses often use LLM AI tools to automate content creation. They can give it prompts and tell it to change the prompts slightly to generate content regularly for many purposes, like blog articles, to increase domain authority for a new website.

Many companies use these tools because they are fast, easy to use, and customizable, and they often get the results the user wants.

The Opportunities of AI-Generated Content

ChatGPT 4 exploded onto the business and domestic scene in March 2023. It caused waves and made millions of people quickly realize they now had access to something they previously didn’t know they needed: an AI tool to generate content and research.

Many of the other opportunities AI-generated content presents include speed, low cost, personalization and scalability, and data-driven insights.

Speed and Efficiency

AI tools can produce content far more quickly than humans, meaning that companies can save time producing content, especially at scale. For example, you can automate an article that an AI tool could create in minutes. This capability means you could produce thousands of articles a day if necessary.

Cost Reduction

Because you can produce content so quickly with AI, you can save on human staff. Especially if you need a lot of content quickly. AI does not take time off when its sick, because it’s a machine, and you can quickly tell it to rebuild a piece of content if it doesn’t satisfy your needs on the first attempt.

Personalization and Scalability

The way you can personalize your content with AI is powerful and accessible. You can build content that suits a certain audience, like by giving it the prompt, “write a 100 word cold email outreach for employee productivity SaaS startups offering marketing services”.

This example is perfect for scaling because you can adjust it slightly for each business name and tell the AI tool to pick out a feature and comment on it to engage the reader and show interest in their product in a more human way.

Data-Driven Insights

AI isn’t just great for generating content itself. It’s also a powerful tool for researching what kind of content customers might want. You can use AI to collect data you can analyse to make data-driven insights on any topic of your choosing.

AI is great at analyzing massive data sets and noticing patterns to predict trends. This ability is useful in finance to predict market changes and allow financial institutions to prepare for them in advance.

Consider these opportunities gen AI presents to decide if you need it today in your business.

The Challenges of AI-Generated Content

AI isn’t all sunshine and daisies. There are also a lot of challenges you need to overcome to get the best outputs. The first of these challenges is that AI does not produce the same quality as humans. And it is never as unique.

Quality and Uniqueness Issues

Because AI currently has no creative potential like humans, it uses existing data like poems, articles, and research to draw from and cannot produce its own content. This scenario results in a high risk of AI producing generic and repetitive content. There are ways to mitigate this, but at the end of the day, AI can’t yet do anything like creativity as it can’t think, only simulate human creativity based on existing datasets.

In SEO terms, this hurts your SEO value for content because when content is unique, Google crawlers are happy, but when Google can see a piece of content is generic, it marks it as low value, making it less likely to rank.

Authenticity and Trust

It’s a huge challenge to create a sense of authenticity and trust when you use a lot of AI content. The reason is that readers are beginning to notice patterns in AI-generated content. And if they see one piece of AI content on your site, they will suspect others might be AI too. This response can lead to a domino effect of word of mouth leading to damages to reputation and lower traffic to your site.

Data Privacy Concerns

Like everything useful and easy on the internet, there are major ethical issues with using AI in some ways. For example, if you use AI to collect information on customers to personalize your content, you have to consider whether the customers know you are doing this. If not, you may be violating regulations that govern how you collect, store, and use data.

Ensure you comply with regulations in your area to avoid violating customer rights when using their data to generate AI content.

Content Accuracy and Bias

If you own a website where factual information is critical, like a news or science site, be careful when using AI to generate content. It can output content that is inaccurate and biased. Some of the bias can be offensive to some readers if it’s political in nature, and if it’s inaccurate, it could negatively impact the reputation of your website for Google crawlers and readers, reducing traffic. \

Consider all these challenges of AI before using it to generate content to get the safest, best results.

Best Practices for Balancing AI Efficiency with Human Oversight

AI or human content? Why not both? You can generate content with AI but use human oversight to manage the challenges and optimize the opportunities that make these tools, especially enterprise AI tools like AI21, so popular.

Follow these best practices to balance AI efficiency with human oversight and get the best out of people and machines.

Human-in-the-Loop Approaches

The best and simplest way to combine AI with human writers is to have one person automate high volumes of content and then have a skilled human editor edit the content to make it SEO and reader friendly and give it a human feel. This approach combines the efficiency of AI with human creativity and editing, with the output being high quality but finished quickly.

Developing Clear Guidelines

AI is like an inexperienced intern: enthusiastic but unskilled. Clear guidelines are needed to give you the best results. But if you are too vague and don’t tell exactly what you need and how you want it to output the content you need, your output will be as vague and generic as the prompts you enter.

Set the standards for AI-generated content using the following criteria:

• Accuracy and factual correctness: Is the content accurate and factually correct? Add a section of the prompt to cite the sources and check them manually.
• Originality and plagiarism concerns: Is the content original and free of plagiarism, which could negatively impact your SEO score for the content?
• Relevance to target audience and marketing objectives: Consider what kind of style your audience wants and add this to the prompt to appeal to the right audience and make the content successful
• Brand alignment and tone consistency: Ensure you mention your branding and the tone of your organization in the prompt. If you are using enterprise AI, you can set this automatically and use industry-specific words in all your content.
• Engagement and accessibility: Ensure you tell the AI tool detailed instructions on how to make the content engaging but also tonally appropriate to your audience and use language to make it easy to digest, even if it explores technical topics.

It’s essential to know these challenges for producing the best AI content. When you understand them, you can tell AI tools exactly what you need and have it delivered every time.

Conclusion

AI is a powerful tool, but it’s relatively new and yet most businesses are using it, sometimes without much confidence or experience. AI is like any other technology, it requires understanding and skill to use it the right way.

AI content is cheap, fast, scalable, and can give you crucial data-driven insights to predict market trends and help you understand segment needs. However, there are also challenges, like poor quality, bias, trust issues, and data privacy compliance.

You can overcome these challenges and reap the full rewards of the opportunities AI offers by following best practices. Use human-in-the-loop approaches, and develop clear guidelines to ensure high quality AI generated content.

When you use these approaches you will use AI to scale to high volumes and satisfy customers with high quality content that engages and converts visitors into loyal customers.