It’s not often that an industry arrives as seemingly fully-fledged as generative AI. Within little more than a year, we’ve gone from the low-key beta unveiling of ChatGPT to a vast multi-billion-pound market segment populated with dozens of content generation startups and competitors. AI text generation is now built into the Bing search engine (which means it’s effectively built into Microsoft Edge), while the most recent McKinsey Global Survey indicates a third of corporate businesses are already using it regularly in at least some capacity.
Oh AI?
Yet this McKinsey study also revealed that most companies aren’t even considering the risk of inaccurate content being produced on their behalf. That’s a remarkable oversight. Companies are blithely trusting new and unproven technology, much of it from unknown startups and unaccountable foreign companies, to represent their own businesses. Worse, they have no plans in place if the content turns out to be wrong, outdated, misleading, libellous, offensive to competitors, offensive to the general public…
As is often the case, the explosive growth in generative AI is being driven by cost considerations. If companies can save a thousand pounds on freelance copywriting by using a chatbot to generate blogs and corporate materials, that thousand pounds can be paid to shareholders in dividends or given to their executives in bonuses. At this formative stage, generative AI platforms are still free (which offers the first clue about the quality of their output), and free is better than cheap. Isn’t it?
As any CEO or director will grudgingly admit, ‘free’ services tend to come with strings attached. And so it is with generative AI. Nothing new is being created here – these engines simply regurgitate existing online material with different wording. That means any inaccuracies, outdated information or source material bias (which will be legion, considering AI engines scrape the entire internet with all its fake news and flawed reportage) is repackaged. Companies who begin to rely on this technology are also in for a nasty shock when the companies who’ve paid small fortunes to develop this server-intensive new technology begin monetising it to pay back their debts. A lot of newly created blogs may wither on the vine when the generative AI taps are suddenly paywalled, sending websites tumbling down search results pages.
You’re Bard, mate
By this point, readers still ruminating on the use of the word ‘free’ two paragraphs back might be trying to justify using generative AI instead of employing freelance copywriters to produce high-quality output. It would be wrong of G75 Media to claim that Google Bard or Perplexity are dangerous – though the electronic origins of erroneous or misleading content won’t serve as any kind of defence in court. Instead, we’d suggest companies determined to publish material which is effectively recycled from existing third-party content need to apply close scrutiny to it. That’s something we can help with, using our award-winning talents to conduct AI editing on content before it’s published in your business’s name.
AI editors add human oversight to machine-generated content, correcting obvious errors and removing contentious statements. AI editing adds the comparisons, humour, anecdotes and cultural references which even the best AI content generators can’t comprehend. Human editing will identify and excise repetition, trim out superfluous content (often used to pad out AI content’s later paragraphs), and ensure formulaic text is smoothed into corporate house writing styles. Without running copy past an AI editor, computer-generated text is usually betrayed by its long paragraphs, drily factual content and robotic delivery. It’s only a matter of time before search engines begin downgrading this mass-produced low-grade content in the same way they’ve previously punished word clouds, link farms and other lazy attempts at gaming SEO algorithms.
How much does an AI editor charge?
AI editing is obviously quicker (and therefore more affordable) than generating new content from scratch, but it requires diligence and an innate understanding of your brand. G75 Media’s AI editing services aren’t free, but they are affordably priced. We ensure rapid turnaround times, helping to minimise the period between an AI engine churning out text and it being safe to upload onto your website. We modify every sentence, using decades of SEO know-how to ensure search engines rank it above anything published by competitors who haven’t invested in an AI editor.
To find out more about AI editing services, and to speak to us about the benefits of content production by humans, get in touch with G75 Media today. There are no chatbots here – just real people with proven skills in the timeless art of finding the right words for every scenario.