If you’ve been keeping tabs on the SEO news lately, you’ve heard that artificial intelligence is frowned upon by search engines.
There’s a lot of discussion as to what AI is going to mean for the future of our jobs, but I think a lot of people have forgotten about one very important technology that’s already changed the face of content marketing: utilizing Ai for writing.
If you’re faced with the task of marketing your business and writing quality content on a regular basis, you might have been tempted to use AI. There are tools like Quill, Wordsmith, and IBM Watson available to make the writing process easier. While these tools can prove helpful, Google’s John Mueller doesn’t recommend using AI for writing purposes. I find that pretty odd considering how much money Alphabet spends researching and implementing new Ai.
The above was written with Ai. Pretty cool, and it all makes sense! Not 100%, but a great deal of it. So why all the Ai hate by John Mueller over at Google? Likely because Ai copy is not authentic and therefore goes against the E.A.T. (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principles.
E-A-T is one factor that Google uses to evaluate the overall quality of a web page. The E.A.T. concept comes from Google’s Search Quality Rater guidelines becoming infamous soon after Google’s “Medic Update” in August 2018.
Google’s own Ai website states, “From our products to our open-source platforms, we’re working to ensure that the benefits of AI are accessible to everyone.” So Google clearly knows that there are benefits to Ai technology for all manner of projects.
PROS
- Ai creates compelling text
- It creates prompts for you to expand on in your words
- Fully editable to tailor copy to your needs
- Creates content based on set rules
CONS
- Google says it is in bad form to use Ai for website text
- It can read like Ai wrote it
- Ai often makes mistakes in common speech patterns
- Can be expensive
Meta Ai Projects
Facebook’s parent company Meta is also heavily invested in Ai, and they are very open with the details of some of the projects that they are supporting.
For instance, PyTorch is an open-source deep learning framework built to be flexible and modular for research. It enables fast, flexible experimentation through a tape-based autograd system designed for immediate and python-like execution.
And while there are many projects listed on Meta’s Ai Tools page, another interesting project is StarSpace; “it is a general-purpose neural embedding model that can be applied to a number of machine learning tasks, including ranking, classification, information retrieval, similarity learning, and recommendations. It’s both highly competitive with existing methods while generalizing well to new use cases”. Sounds like they may be getting into the search engine business before too long, too.
Meta is building an army of Ai tools and projects; another significant project is the Hateful Memes, which is a competition and open source dataset designed to measure progress in multimodal vision-and-language classification. The idea is to get businesses using Facebook to spend more time on that platform and ultimately boost sales by sharing their products.
Even though most of us have little understanding of what Ai is, it has been changing our lives for the better for years. From increased yields in aquaculture to controlled feeding schedules at Zoos, it seems that almost every business is embracing Ai in one way or another. So why not your website? Webmasters deserve the benefits other businesses are exploiting via Ai.
In conclusion, A lot of webmasters already know the benefits of artificial intelligence for their clients and personal projects. If used wisely and not overtly, your website can benefit too.
Website developer, field recordist, instrument builder. My background is largely based in design for the music industry; websites, micro-sites, and apparel. With that experience, I bring a fresh approach to corporate and construction-related web projects looking to stand apart from the competition. My goal is to help clients better understand different aspects of SEO and website development; I write short, easy-to-digest articles on search engine optimization and website performance-related topics.
In my free time, I enjoy field recording, sound design, and building unusual musical instruments.
Michael Winchester is a website developer and search engine consultant in Southern California.
Michael Winchester Design | (562)283-5688