Chat GPT has caused quite the stir since its release. As more users continue to experiment with ChatGPT, the AI technology continues to impress with its capabilities. ChatGPT has sparked discussions and questions across many industries as to what it will mean for the future and what role AI will play in the workforce and our day-to-day lives.
Without a doubt, we have only scratched the surface of what AI technologies like ChatGPT will be capable of in the future. It will be fascinating to see how AI technology impacts large companies and industries, challenging them to adapt in order to remain competitive and pushing them to innovate to use it to their advantage.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a Large Learning Model (LLM) that is trained on massive amounts of data in order to understand language patterns. The software understands these patterns so well that it is able to predict what word should come next in a sentence. ChatGPT was combined with another large learning model–Instruct GPT–which was trained to take directions from humans and from long-form essays. In its released beta form, ChatGPT is also continuously learning from the interactions it has and feedback it receives from the public.
We have likely only seen the early possibilities for AI content, but there are a few things that ChatGPT certainly has us excited about.
The Good: Benefits of using ChatGPT for content
One area where ChatGPT–and AI technology–has effectively stirred the pot is content creation. ChatGPT has the ability to create educated, well-written, and diverse content in a matter of seconds. Content writers, marketers, SEO professionals, students, and more have marveled and tested the expediency at which ChatGPT understands complex commands and requirements, producing a quality piece of writing in seconds.
Whether it’s ad copy, blog posts, newsletters, essays, or even a thesis, ChatGPT has demonstrated its ability to take existing knowledge and transform it into unique responses. However, this innovative technology inevitably raises the question: is it ethical to use ChatGPT?
What sets ChatGPT apart from other AI software
The ability to understand human instruction
ChatGPT’s ability to not only complete and improve existing content, but to take direction from users and generate content from scratch is what makes this tool so compelling for creation. ChatGPT creates content that includes certain points and reflects a particular tone of voice within specified parameters such as word count.
The Bad: What content creators (and students) need to understand about AI-generated content
The AI fingerprint
While ChatGPT generally produces original outputs, AI generated content is, in fact, traceable. Open AI–the software company behind the creation of ChatGPT–developed a fingerprinting technique to identify content that has been generated by AI models like ChatGPT. It involves embedding unique markers or “fingerprints” within the generated text that can be used to distinguish it from human-written content.
These markers are incorporated in a way that doesn’t alter the meaning or quality of the text, but it allows for reliable detection of AI-generated content.
As this technology continues to evolve, so will the ability to detect it. If you’re a student or content creator, be mindful of using the tool to produce “original content” as the authenticity and origin of digital content is traceable.
AI-generated content and SEO
Per Google’s guidelines and standards for high-quality, unique content, AI-generated content is not currently permissible. Using AI to generate web copy and articles for the purpose of ranking higher in search results will likely result in a red flag from Google, a decline in domain authority, and an inability to rank well in Google search results.
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller said this in a Google Search Central SEO office-hours hangout:
“For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.
People have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kinds of things.
My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically-generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
When it comes to 100% AI-generated content, it’s not recommended that you rely on this for unique thought leadership (which is what Google values and ranks highly). You can, however, use it for brainstorming, generating writing prompts, and finding different ways to phrase your thoughts.
ChatGPT is out of date
There have already been updates to some of ChatGPT’s information, but it is still out-of-date as the data it was built on ends in 2021. So, if you ask it to write a piece that needs to incorporate correct, current information, it won’t be able to deliver.
This is another reason to be careful and not simply “cut and paste” content that ChatGPT creates to use it for your own content.
The Gray Area: ChatGPT vs. human authenticity
Since ChatGPT was launched as a prototype on November 30th 2022, there are approximately 450,000 search engine queries a month for “ChatGPT” and approximately 6,600 searches a month for “can ChatGPT write essays?” and “AI essay writer.”
AI and plagiarism
In the world of academia, ChatGPT and other AI tools raise issues around plagiarism and students passing off AI-generated content as their own original work.
Although pagiarism is considered unethical, many students are tempted to use AI to save themselves time and effort. Why take the time to write something yourself when AI technology can articulate exactly what you want for you in a fraction of the time? The answer is that having a “robot” write a piece of content for you raises many questions about the ethics of ChatGPT uses.
This problem has grown on so many school campuses that a special tool has been developed to help teachers detect if their students’ work has been written by AI or not.
The Future of ChatGPT & AI
AI Investment
Over the last few years, AI technology has changed industries in many ways by automating tasks and streamlining processes. As it advances and new use cases continue to arise, its realm of possibilities is likely to keep growing.
We continue to see more and more large corporations investing in AI; their eagerness to become stakeholders is only a testament to the potential for AI growth. For example, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and there are now rumors circulating that the powerhouse is poised to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI to further the advancements of AI and ChatGPT.
As a content creator, SEO, or marketing professional, this investment should be received as an indication that search engines like BING (owned by Microsoft) and Google will be especially privy to AI’s data capabilities and, adversely, the watermark of AI-generated content.
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