ChatGPT and other AI tools are a hot topic right now, as they should be. They are rapidly changing how businesses plan their content strategies.
But these AI tools do have serious flaws, as I recently wrote on LinkedIn.
They can write content based on what other writers have posted online…but they cannot generate original ideas.
They can’t understand human psychology or relate to people one-on-one (even if that relationship is one-way, i.e. the writer and the reader).
They also don’t cite sources, so it’s a lot of work to try and figure out where they pulled their information.
And, since AI-generated content is based on the work of an untold number of human authors, this Frankenstein’ed content is inherently filled with inaccuracies, old data, and biases.
In other words, like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.
I’m trying out some ChatGPT on my own website, to see how it performs. Because I’m a realist. I know my clients are going to start eyeballing these tools, trying to calculate how they might be used to save them money. That’s fair; I get it.
So to my fellow writers, I say get ahead of the curve. Tinker around, and see for yourself the pros and cons, the advantages and inherent limitations. Right now, ChatGPT is free but probably because the programmers are letting it feed and get practice.
Soon it will likely cost $$$ to use, just like Jasper and other similar resources. A paywall will slow down some users, but not all. And in the meantime, the web’s about to get filled up with AI-generated content, and I predict these programs will soon start to regurgitate their own words as they scan the web, look for articles to scavenge and find their own works!
What effect will that have? Probably content will become increasingly homogenous, and Google algorithms may start to pick up on that and react accordingly.
Another interesting twist being discussed is, who exactly owns the content created by ChatGPT, et. al.? There is no human writer, and so I “think” as it currently stands, the content isn’t owned by anyone. So, I “think” that just because a user plugs in a question into ChatGPT then decides to post the output, that user doesn’t own the output (i.e., the content) any more than anybody else does (or doesn’t)!
This Forbes article has some interesting insights. Right now, AI-generated text does not seem to be ‘owned’ by anyone.
So, if ChatGPT “writes” something, in theory, there’s no owner…so there goes copyright protection.
If the AI writes basically the same thing over and over for different users, they’ll all be posting sort of the same thing.
A legal blog I saw mentioned that if ChatGPT rips off an existing article, then if that article is copyright protected, the owner could come after anyone that publishes what ChatGPT “wrote.”
Anyways, right now I think it is more for personal use, not for folks to use to generate content that they can publish. But, I doubt anyone is following that.
I don’t mind using it as you like, but I’m just not sure how much it could help.
Cheers!