Is AI Content Doomed?

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello and welcome to episode 82 of SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of KeyWidgePeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo. I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and I've sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Speaker 1: 0:25

Today, I'm going to be asking the question is AI content doomed? So this episode, yeah, it's all about AI content and is it doomed or not? And I've got some very specific thoughts on this. Obviously, it's very in the fore with the Google updates that are going on and the kind of sites that Google has been de-endexing and hitting. It's clear that Google don't like the idea of AI for mass content creation and they consider that a spam. So Google definitely don't want a future with mass spam, ai content and, if you think about it, probably we don't either, because if Google just accepted all AI spam or all AI content and just let the index fill and fill and fill with all this content that people can produce just by pressing a few buttons, doing a very simple prompts, then it's actually just going to fill the actual index with complete crap. It's going to be no good for anyone. Even the people that are really good at producing this content and have got all the skills to do it which, to be fair, aren't that hard they're soon just going to drown under all this content and you only need a few people doing it in the same niche and then all of a sudden the niche just becomes full of absolute rubbish. Because the very nature of AI content is it's not original. It may look original, but it's not actually based on anything original. It's just the sum of the average of the research. The learning that that language model, that large language model, did is what becomes the sum of all the parts. So, yeah, so the content is rubbish. So you wouldn't want to be going and looking and trying to do some research and learn something and find that all you get is AI content, because the content level that doesn't tell you anything new.

Speaker 1: 2:33

Where AI has been good is when you talk directly to the AI yourself about specific issues and specific problems, and particularly in areas where it's not subjective, it's a very right or wrong answer. So, for example, if you're trying to do some coding or trying to sort a particular technical problem. It can be great to interrogate chat GPT. I use it myself for programming tasks. I've used it for mechanical engineering tasks completely unrelated to work. When I was had an issue with my digger on the farm, I was literally started talking to chat GPT about it and I said do you know the Takuchi TB 228? And it was like, yeah, I know that. I know that model of digger and then I sort of described the problem to it and it helped me diagnose an issue with it. And then I went out to the machine, found the problem. We fixed it based on a conversation I had with chat GPT. So I think that's where there is a future for AI content and that is the conversational type content like that, where you can have a backwards and forwards between you and the AI and you can ask very specific questions and then build on those questions, and chat GPT works great for that.

Speaker 1: 3:46

But if you're a website owner or a website user, you don't necessarily want just reams and reams and reams of AI produced content because, yeah, it's just having seen more and more and more of it. Now I'm struggling to even think of a single example of any AI content on a website that I've thought, hey, that is brilliant, that's really good, that's better than anyone could produce by human effort. So I think it's doomed in the respect that Google clearly doesn't want to fill its index with this stuff, and I think people in the long run are gonna get better and better at just spotting it themselves and not wanting themselves. There's an example I've seen of a website that's been hit in this latest update and it's by a guy called Jesse Cunningham, and I'm not outing him here because he's done videos and spoke about this himself. So my philosophy is never to out people unless they've outed themselves and they're talking about themselves. So I mean, there are other examples I've seen of sites I know have been taken down from this. I know I've had AI on them, but these people I haven't been public about it, so I'm not gonna be public about them either.

Speaker 1: 5:06

But this one that Jesse Cunningham has shared is an example of one and it's called bonsaimericom, so bonsaiers and the bonsai trees, and bonsaimericom is the website. He shared the website and he's quite annoyed that it got taken down. But I've looked at it and I think it's been taken down for the right reasons. Now it's a repurposed domain. If you look at archiveorg of bonsaimericom, it started about 2008, I think 2009 by a woman called Mary who was a bonsai expert and she was quite old at the time. I mean, I don't know if she's still alive, but she would certainly be quite old if she was still alive and she was a bonsai expert and she'd been doing bonsai for years and years and years and growing it. She had a bonsai nursery and she wrote about bonsai. Now, obviously, at some point she's let that site go and it's been picked up somewhere else and someone's kind of resurrected some of the content and then at some point, jesse Cunningham has got hold of the site and he's there.

Speaker 1: 6:08

And if you go onto that site and have a look at it, at the very front of the site there is a picture of this woman who says this is bonsaimeri and if you look at it, the first glance it looks like a genuine woman, but then, if you look carefully, that's an AI image and I put it in an AI detector that you can put images in, and this AI detector is pretty sure that's an AI image. And I look at it and it's it is an AI image. I can't see it being anything other. And then it makes you question all the other images on the site whether they are or are not AI. And obviously Murray Smith isn't the author of bonsaimeri, because Jesse Cunningham's owning up to having owned this site and if you go through all the content that they're putting out on it, you can put that in AI detectors and it's clearly picked up as being AI. You can see it yourself just reading it.

Speaker 1: 7:06

If you've read enough, and Google have hit this site and taken it out, and I think you know that's fair enough because, well, it's not a badly put together site. It is just churning out AI content. I have to AI content. I have to AI content and it's not what I wanna see. If you go, look at archiveorg from the original bonsaimeri site by the original Murray I think it's Murray Miller. Her name is Murray C Miller. That's really good. She's got a proper story. It's a proper. You want to read it because she's got a whole history in there about how she set up her first bonsai nursery and it's genuine, whereas you come here and this is just how it is now. It's just not genuine.

Speaker 1: 7:48

So I don't blame Google for taking it out. I think it's not a valuable site as it is. I think it deserves to be taken out, I think, because you just gotta look at it and say, if people just keep creating these sites and turning them out, and turning them out, and turning them out, the whole of the internet is just gonna be compoiteness, gonna be a big pointless mess where no one knows what is truthful, what isn't truthful, and how good, how good, not good, anything is. So, yeah, so I'm sorry, jesse, if you're listening to disagree with you. You think it should be kept in, but I don't think it should. I don't think it's the right kind of site that's in there because it's not doing anything original. It's not real.

Speaker 1: 8:34

Now, I know at the moment there are still plenty of sites out there with AI content on that are still ranking and people are saying are still ranking. And to me that doesn't mean that that means that AI can still work for the long run, because obviously Google have got it in their sites now and they don't want AI content in their index, and this means that it's now a game of cat and mouse and Google are a huge tech company with thousands of highly talented engineers. They will solve this problem. I think they're getting the start of it now and, okay, people are saying, oh, they can only take it down with money and actions. Well, they've found all these sites and they've taken them down, and not all of them were publicly known sites. And I think they're still doing this public takedown and manual penalties because they're trying to send a message out there.

Speaker 1: 9:35

I think part of it is to spread fear and certainty and doubt amongst people using AI content. And even though now they're doing it but there's money elections I think there are sites being hit which aren't manual, I think are algorithmic, and I think there will be more and more algorithmic updates coming down the line that are gonna target more and more AI content. They're gonna get better at detecting this stuff. I mean, it's easy for them to do in many respects. Some people say it's too far from the two, but I don't actually agree with that. I mean, I am a software engineer, so I do understand a little bit about some of the capabilities With machine learning. They can train machine learning on AI content so that machine learning can start to recognize AI content. Okay, there'll be some false positives, but it's doable. It's the same with images, it's the same with text same with all types of content like that. They will be able to train against this and even if they pick up okay, only 95% of it, that's still gonna clear out a huge swaze of the index, to the point that it will put people off doing it. I hope, because it's not just gonna, it's just gonna ruin it for Google. If the index and the internet just gets filled with a pure AI content, people are just gonna stop using it. It will just be the end of the web as we know it in many respects, especially for informational content, if it's just full of all that spam.

Speaker 1: 11:06

I would also caution listening to people who say that there is a big future for AI content. You might spot that a lot of them are actually promoting tools whether it's their own or other peoples which have been built over the past year or so that create huge amounts of AI content. Obviously they've got a vested interest in you buying their tools and producing loads of content, but if you just step back and think about it, you can just see how it isn't gonna end well for people or for the internet if content just gets pumped out of that level. And, like I say, I'm not completely done on AI AI for producing very specific content for a user in time, like chatting, chat, gpt and talking through an issue, a problem or something you're trying to learn about. Yeah, it's still very valuable and that is gonna get better and better and that will take more and more traffic away from the internet, from the sort of the Google based internet in time.

Speaker 1: 12:13

And there are other ways you can use AI in SEO. I mean, it's not to say that SEO can't use AI. It can definitely be used in research. I think what you need to do if you're gonna use AI is you need to bring something original in and you can give original content to tools like chat, gpt and tell it, ask it to analyze it, ask it to mix that data up and learn something from it, and that, I think, is where the real value is gonna be in using AI. So it's kind of like AI enhanced content, but I think the ideation has to remain human, the input has to remain human and the sort of value creation has to be human, because there are limitations in what AI can do at the moment.

Speaker 1: 13:08

I'm not saying in the future, with general intelligence AI, all bets might be off, but where we are right now. You can use AI as part of your research. You can use AI to help you manipulate data and manipulate ideas, but I think, at the end of the day, your content has to be human written. But there's no harm in using AI to critique the content you've produced, to ask it for what areas that might have been missed, asking AI to help you do research, but it needs to be based on original stuff. So, yes, where does that lead us? I mean, is this the end of AI content? It's probably not the end, but, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's probably the beginning of the end. We've seen this in the past with tactics that worked and then Google picked up on them and decided to end it, and they've been successful in many regards in many areas.

Speaker 1: 14:11

But this one, I think, is more than just about Google and it being all about Google. I think it's all about it is actually all about the end user in this case, and I don't want to see a Google result, search result of any kind, where I just come along and every page is just cookie cutter. Ai produced content, that's all just. Basically, you have to take the pinch of salt. You don't know how well it's been proved for it. You don't know how well it's been fact checked. You just don't know whether you can trust it or not. And if we get to the point where we we and other people using Google can't trust it, then that's going to be the end of Google. It's going to be the end of creating websites. It's going to be the end of all of this. So it's not actually in our interests to do this and to be completely obsessed with creating content and AI. So I think I have to agree with Google on this one, I'm afraid.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that Keywords People use, that you can now book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I'll show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopletousecom slash demo where you can pick a time of date that suits for you for us to catch up, so that the keywordspeopletousecom slash demo and that link will also be in the show notes. Hope to see you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1: 15:45

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