Let’s Tap the Brakes on AI Generated Content

By Greg Bussmann

This piece originally appeared on gregbussmann.com.

Or, Why Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Ready to Replace Human Writers–and May Never Be

My only prediction for 2023 is that the term “artificial intelligence” (or simply AI)  will be legally required to appear at least once in every LinkedIn post from now until the end of time.

However, if you’re a freelance writer,  the technology, like my attempt at humor, can be off-putting.

Artificial Intelligence feels like an existential threat to your career. I get it. The technology promises better content in a fraction of the time and at essentially no cost. So far, however, the promise is outpacing reality.

The following articles put my mind at ease, so I thought I would share.

Artificial Intelligence Has No Common Sense

Computer scientist Yejin Choi, a 2022 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “genius” grant, has been doing groundbreaking research on developing common sense and ethical reasoning in A.I. She was recently interviewed by the New York Times (no paywall, I gifted you the article) and had this to say about AI:

Whenever there’s a lot of patterns, a lot of data, A.I. is very good at processing that — certain things like the game of Go or chess. But humans have this tendency to believe that if A.I. can do something smart like translation or chess, then it must be really good at all the easy stuff too. The truth is, what’s easy for machines can be hard for humans and vice versa. You’d be surprised how A.I. struggles with basic common sense. It’s crazy.

She delves into a fascinating breakdown of why common sense is so hard for the machines — because as humans, there’s so much knowledge that is just a foregone conclusion, but that is not the case for AI:

We don’t know the exact fraction of knowledge that you and I have that we didn’t talk about — but still know — but my speculation is that there’s a lot. Let me give you another example: You and I know birds can fly, and we know penguins generally cannot. So A.I. researchers thought, we can code this up: Birds usually fly, except for penguins. But in fact, exceptions are the challenge for common-sense rules. Newborn baby birds cannot fly, birds covered in oil cannot fly, birds who are injured cannot fly, birds in a cage cannot fly. The point being, exceptions are not exceptional, and you and I can think of them even though nobody told us. It’s a fascinating capability, and it’s not so easy for A.I.

She wraps it up by saying that we are taken with AI possibilities because we see the best examples, which require the most human input to achieve. The reality is in the average output, which is far less impressive.

Google Won’t Take Artificial Intelligence Lying Down

The reason that freelance writers don’t need to panic about AI yet because it is an existential threat to Google, and they are not just going to let the tool decimate their business. What that means in practice can’t be said definitively yet, but this Business Insider article illustrates the point:

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who oversaw Google’s ad team between 2013 and 2018, said ChatGPT could prevent users from clicking on Google links with ads, which generated $208 billion — 81% of Alphabet’s overall revenue — in 2021, Insider reported.

ChatGPT, which amassed over 1 million users five days after its public launch in November, can generate singular answers to queries in a conversational, humanlike way by collecting information from millions of websites. Users have asked the chatbot to write a college essay, provide coding advice, and even serve as a therapist.

There is a Use Case For AI-Generated Content

It’s just not generating fully-formed blog posts for your website. Sitechecker found in a survey that 70% of SEO experts have has positive experiences with AI-generated content but are still sure this content isn’t enough to get to the top of the SERP without human touch.

Most of the time, the use case is more in line with rounding out outlines or generating titles, headers, and meta descriptions.

So, the bottom line: play around with AI tools, maybe even find a task or two in your workflow that they help with. But I would be reluctant to turn over wholesale blog generation to them at this point.