ChatGPT and The Dumbing Down of Online Content
Even casual readers will notice that online content is becoming increasingly sales-driven and formulaic, with each piece blander than the last. AI writing software is at the heart of this – blog posts are churned out to beat the algorithm and outrank the competition. Here, we revisit AI with the birth of ChatGPT and ask whether it’s really changing the game for the future of writing.
Sometimes technology seems to take an age to deliver on a promise – I’m still waiting for a phone battery that lasts for two days, or a way to meet someone online that doesn’t make me want to peel off my own skin. But sometimes things surge forward with a surprising speed, and before we know it the world has changed, and the new reality has become accepted as normal. The smartphone market felt this way in 2007 – years of ‘almost there’ and then the iPhone arrived and just shut down the game.
ChatGPT is starting to feel like an example of this as well. For several years we have seen AI writing software creating SEO-driven blogs that were passable but poorly written, with glaring omissions apparent only to native English speakers. I’ve written previously on the problems with non-English speakers acting as gatekeepers for English language content, and the problems this can cause. Now, with ChatGPT as a free AI writer, we have technology capable of creating grammatically good writing for the first time, with a proper understanding of tone and mood. But is this a blessing or a curse for those of us in the writing game?
Chat GPT and the slow creep of AI content writing
If you’ve got your finger on the pulse of sales-driven affiliate blog writing, you’ll understand the business model - churn content just good enough to fool Google and drive traffic to your site. Lower costs at all costs - if you need a pro content writer, source them on Fiverr or Upwork and pay them $15 for a 3000-word article (and then be disappointed with the quality). Now, all this is about to change. Your average passive income guru can outsource this charade to AI writing software and have an equally poor-quality article written for free, or at the cost of a yearly subscription.
This is becoming a talking point. Online commentator Nina Schick has commented on the issue of AI blog writers in an interview with Yahoo Finance, where she stated that she believes 90% of online content could be generated by AI writing software by 2025, with the inevitable competition for ChatGPT visible on the horizon. It’s apparent to anyone with an online presence that ChatGPT has already captured people’s attention in a big way in the weeks since its release, and this feels like the start of a sea-change in online content writing and marketing.
But where you perhaps wonder, is the downside? I see a time-saving bit of tech, that we can use to help us with menial tasks. To my mind, the downside is the abysmal lack of engagement and quality in ChatGPT and other free AI writing software. They can write without error and can mimic some elements of mood and tone. For example, if you instructed it to ‘write a lively essay on Roald Dahl’, or ‘a serious academic piece on Mozart’, it will at least pay lip service to these instructions. But what is universally true about all AI-generated pieces I have read is just how boring they seem to be. They are as formulaic as a 5th grader trying to navigate the written word for the first time. As Ian Bogost pointed out in the Atlantic, ChatGPT absurdly even begins its concluding paragraphs with, In Conclusion. It’s like half-hearted high-school essay writing revisited – perfect for an audience lacking in time, and with an increasingly deficient capacity for deep thinking.
Is Open AI creating misinformation?
What truly amazed me in my first forays into using ChatGPT, was how inaccurate it was, and how unapologetic it seemed to be about this. I generated a short article on AI itself, to research the topic and check for sources. The result was formulaic, so far so predictable, but what caught me off guard was that some information just seemed to be completely fabricated. I asked it for the sources it had used, and it said it couldn’t give them. I then asked it separately to list 10 sources related to the increase of AI content writers online, and it rolled off ten seemingly relevant links. I clicked on them and each led to a 404 error - they were all dead links. When I posed this same question in a new session, I was then told there were now no sources available. I found this baffling – I had made my peace with the mediocre writing, but what I didn’t expect was a complete disregard for facts and a strangely coy relationship with reality.
We are the misinformation generation, where truth is a rare commodity. How absurd would it be to give ChatGPT this level of power and respect when it is so obviously floored as a source of information? If you toss out an AI article without checking the facts, there is a chance you are just polluting the online world with nonsense, and you will have to turn to an AI rewriter to undo the damage. What really boggled my mind is that it still provided me with links. I think it just created them with the words I wanted and hoped for the best! Ultimately the session ended with me finding my sources the old-fashioned way… using Google.
Poor-quality content leads to higher bounce rates
Aside from its strange relationship with the truth, ChatGPT content offends me as instantly as bad spelling or poor grammar. This is possibly just the snobbery that comes from being an avid reader and writer, but once you see it you can’t un-see it. The formula of AI writing generators is written through it like a stick of rock. As soon as I see it on a website I had previously respected, I leave straight away. Why would I stay on a site that views me, the reader, with such disdain? A website that holds me in such low regard that it thinks I will be engaged by entry-level content that reads like it was written by an above-average ten-year-old? I leave in search of higher-quality sites where the written word is still valued and the writing is there to provoke thought, not drive-through a sale via an affiliate link or a Shopify promotion.
And this is the future that AI writing software has given us, I think. Online content has become uniform and predictable. Websites giving us the hard sell, even when they manage to fool the Google algorithm, are likely to be dismissed by an increasingly savvy and cynical reader. When compared to AI-generated writing, good writing stands in even starker contrast and is an even rarer commodity than it used to be. AI’s limitations stand to drive more and more clients to actual copywriters. All the things that we engage with as complex, thinking beings – new ideas, the swoop and dive of well-formed sentences, the emotional resonance caused by the rhythm and momentum of a good article – cannot be reproduced by software. My experience gives me an insight into this - on Fiverr, where I work sometimes, the searches for AI rewriters - ie copywriters who rewrite AI content - are increasing exponentially. I’ve had a gig there for this service since May 2022, because I could see the writing, ahem, on the wall.
The question for a professional copywriter is - will there be a time when we can no longer tell normal writing apart from that created by AI content writer services? Probably, but I think it will be a slow process of gradual refinement following this initial jump forward. I loved my first iPhone in 2007, to the extent that I’m still using them in 2023. But I’m not holding my breath on that two-day battery life – I think I could be waiting a while.
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