Tag Archives: automation

Why now is the time to add quality content to your company website

With hindsight, the arrival of generative AI a couple of years ago is beginning to closely resemble the short-lived phenomenon of peer-to-peer filesharing. Emerging from a cloudless sky in the late 1990s like a lightning bolt to the creative industries, P2P filesharing capitalised on the burgeoning number of personal internet connections by offering a sudden – and almost violently reactive – democratisation of access to media content.

For consumers who had been price gouged by music labels and DVD sellers over many years, the ability to grab free music and download pirated films often felt like a blessing. And in fairness, some artists actively supported the concept. Radiohead and The Offspring were among the high-profile bands to champion platforms like Napster, or make free music available to swell their fanbase and encourage purchases of their album archives. There are artists around today whose reputation was forged in P2P sharing, just as tape trading propelled some musicians to stardom in the 1980s.

Bursting the bubble

Yet P2P filesharing proved to be a short-lived phenomenon which attracted a swift and brutal crackdown from the industries whose creative content was being illegally shared en masse. Many uploaded files were of poor quality or not as described, while it was impossible to escape the fact that talented artists weren’t being paid whenever their content was stolen. Platforms like Napster were quickly suffocated by punitive lawsuits, and when legitimate business models failed to take flight, the entire P2P industry collapsed in on itself.

Today, we can expect similar things to happen with generative AI. Indeed, the parallels are uncanny. Once again, entire swathes of digital content (this time mostly written forms) are being systematically plundered with no respect for copyright. Once again, high-quality content is being repackaged with diminished quality and distributed with no royalties or recognition of the artists responsible for creating it. Once again, the legal industry is creaking into gear with enough IP lawsuits and litigation to keep the world’s lawyers working overtime for years to come. And once again, consumers are beginning to turn against the low-grade slop they’re being served up, recognising belatedly that ‘free’ doesn’t mean ‘ethical’, ‘quality’ or ‘dependable’.

The impact on small businesses

What does that mean for a company here in 2026, wanting to add new content to its website, compile a tender document or produce a business report? In theory, being able to add quality content to your company website for free sounds great. Free looks good on the balance sheet, especially in these economically straitened times. However, there are numerous drawbacks to commissioning a generative AI engine to repurpose existing content and attempting to pass it off as your own work:

  • Generative AI is derivative. All platforms like ChatGPT and Grok do is regurgitate what already exists. They might use different phrasing each time, but their output will be predictable and stale, making points any of your competitors could also make, without acknowledging your firm’s USPs.
  • Generative AI is unimaginative. A professional writer will add features no AI algorithm can replicate – humour, warmth, emotional heft, lived experience. When you need to add quality content to your company website, a person can inject urgency, passion and excitement in a way algorithms can’t.
  • Generative AI is effectively theft on a mass scale. I’ve seen my own work presented as an AI ‘answer’ to search engine questions. I never granted permission for this to happen. Do you want your own company to be guilty of plagiarism or copyright infringement when the lawsuits start raining down?
  • Generative AI is likely to be downgraded by the very firms promoting it. Google AI is infuriatingly unreliable, and Google itself will eventually have to acknowledge this. Once it does, sites with AI-generated content are likely to plummet down ranking results, below those with authentic content.
  • Generative AI won’t be free for much longer. The vast data centres and endless arrays of servers used to power genAI tools cost an absolute fortune to build and run. Sooner or later, their owners  will seek to monetise them, turning off the supply of free content in favour of paid business models.

It’s immediately obvious that AI-generated written content isn’t going to stand the test of time. Consumers can tell the difference, just as they can look at an AI-generated photo and instinctively tell it’s fake. And if its content is fake, why would the company that published or promoted it be genuine, or trustworthy? Do consumers really want to hand over money to a company that’s obviously cutting corners, and taking so little pride in its own achievements that AI produced its brochures or blog? Are they likely to receive personalised service or bespoke support from such a company?

The old ways are still the best

If you want to add quality content to your company website in 2026, look beyond the superficial temptations of free, instantly generated text or images. This is the year when quality original content, imbued with the nuance and lived experience only creatives can call upon, will rise to the top of search results and propel companies to the top of their market sectors. AI has many valuable uses – finding specific terms among cluttered inboxes or summarising presentations – but its days of indiscriminate content production are almost inevitably numbered.

When the litigation comes, and the generative AI machines retreat behind paywalls to justify their astronomical running costs, don’t let your company’s online presence be downgraded and ostracised by low-quality AI slop. Instead, ask G75 Media to help you and your business find the right words for any situation. Conference slides, bid writing, marketing copy, recruitment literature, website blogs… whenever you need to add quality content to your company website or marketing materials, we’re here to help. Get in touch with us to find out why paying for premium media content beats stealing it off the internet.

How Microsoft Copilot can help small business owners

Microsoft’s track record of new technologies and product launches has been patchy over the last four decades. For every Windows XP or 11, there’s been a Vista or Windows 8. For every successful Word and Edge browser it’s developed, Microsoft has produced a HoloLens or Windows Phone. And while Microsoft has shrewdly acquired some very influential companies – LinkedIn and Activision to name just two – it has also sunk huge sums into the likes of the Invoke smart speaker, Nokia Lumia smartphones and the Yammer social network tool.

When Microsoft unveiled Bing Chat two years ago, there was a muted response to this new generative AI chatbot, especially since Bing has always been a poor relation to the all-conquering Google search engine. However, having rebranded Chat as Microsoft Copilot, the software has evolved to be far more powerful and effective. It now offers genuine benefits to small business owners and entrepreneurs, so if you’re don’t yet appreciate Microsoft Copilot’s talents, it’s worth reading on…

Flying high

Microsoft Copilot is essentially an automated solutions platform which aims to resolve user queries. For instance, the 365 Copilot is integrated into other Microsoft 365 applications and utilities. If you want to find out how many fields in an Excel spreadsheet incorporate a particular term, you could type in “How many fields have Open status in column D”. Within a few seconds, Copilot will create a formula which resolves this query, before displaying an Insert Cell button. Clicking it inserts the formula and instantly displays the number of fields marked as Open across that particular column. Equally, it can also adjust formatting, create graphs, identify trends and summarise data.

Copilot performs other tasks which are more commonly associated with generative AI, such as image creation. Log into Microsoft Designer, ask it to create an image and then type in a particular search string – a faulty broadband router in a domestic home, for instance. After around fifteen seconds of processing time, four broadly similar images will be displayed of a router covered in red warning lights. These images can then be edited or downloaded as the user wishes.

Growth and costs

The real breakthrough for Microsoft Copilot was the company’s decision to incorporate it into Windows 11, positioning it on the Taskbar and ensuring a Copilot icon is displayed in iconic Microsoft packages like Word and PowerPoint. By constructing it using the pre-existing GPT-4 large language model developed by OpenAI (a company Microsoft has invested heavily in), Copilot was able to hit the ground running and gain advocates at a startling rate.

Like many software packages, Copilot operates a freemium model. It’s possible to access basic features free of charge or pay to unlock a Pro subscription which offers the latest features and the ability to create a custom chatbot. There are chatbots dedicated to travel, cooking and personal fitness, while Copilot can discuss websites as you browse them. It can serve as a translator, source information from the internet, or even check product inventory and shipping data when you grant Copilot database access.

Should I be concerned about Microsoft Copilot?

There are legitimate concerns about the removal of human involvement in automated processes, especially when Copilot drafts up an email on your behalf by scanning previous emails, giving you the option to vary the tone of the new email depending on how assertive (i.e. angry) you want to sound. It’s one thing letting AI summarise a Teams call, but it’s quite another letting it produce corporate communications. Microsoft is unlikely to accept responsibility if your company issues a statement/email/report/spreadsheet with Copilot-generated inaccuracies in it. Clients will also take a dim view of receiving AI-generated content, especially if it contains mistakes.

Hallucinations remain a problem for AI models, while their attempts at political correctness have hitherto resulted in images of black Vikings, or seen foodbanks listed as tourist destinations. Some might dismiss these errors as teething troubles, but there is a very real issue of incorrect AI-generated results being fed back into the source material for these AI engines, creating a negative loop of increasingly wayward output. This is going to become more problematic as the large language models powering AI engines run out of existing internet content to plagiarise, and as publishers add anti-scraping tools to their websites to prevent new material being pillaged in the same way. Some believe generative AI will improve its quality in the coming months and years, whereas others argue it’s already peaked.

Don’t approach Microsoft Copilot thinking it can do your job while you do something else – such attitudes could land you in a great deal of trouble. But if you’ve ever found yourself thinking “there must be an easier way to do this” while using a Microsoft package or utility, Copilot may be the answer to your frustrations. And if you don’t like the idea of generative AI speaking on behalf of your brand or business, you could always use the traditional method of employing a freelance writer to handle your content, editorial and journalism needs. Get in touch with G75 Media to see why even the best generative AI platforms will never match the nuance, humour and lived experience imbued into our award-winning copywriting services.

* No generative AI was used in the making of this blog.