🗒️ Overview
- Can you publish AI generated content as is?
- The future of AI content creation
- Google I/O updates
Wondering whether to use an AI article generator to save time? In this episode, Mark and Gael review some of the AI tools out there and tell you everything you need to know.
Google I/O Recap
In case you missed it, Google has just announced it’s PaLM 2 model, which is basically GPT for Google. And their next model, Gemini, will be multimodal, which means it can analyse different types of inputs, like text and images.
Of note? Gemini will come with built in watermarking from the beginning, meaning that you won’t be able to pass off generated text or generated images as real. And they’ve just announced a new feature, Perspectives, which might stop sites using their high DR to get away with creating average content.
If small content creators if they produce quality content. But there’s no date when this will be released, so it might not roll out for a while. The tl;dr – there’s some potential opportunities with E-E-A-T, some potential negatives with the generative AI, but it’s too early to tell.
AI Tools Overview
Here’s what we tested:
We put Koala, Frase and Surfer to the test to see what they could produce with just one keyword as a prompt, and created two sample articles for each – one round-up review and one information article.
Koala.sh uses GPT-4, so it’s pretty expensive at $5 for a 2000 word article. But overall, Koala did pretty well. The introduction was way too long, and the product section wasn’t great. But it broke up the text nicely, it could fake E-E-A-T very well, and overall it did a surprisingly good job.
That doesn’t mean you don’t have to still put in some work – Koala’s round-up article is still missing things like a tl;dr section and FAQs, but it’s a good starting place. And Koala’s information article had less of a personal touch and the tone felt different.
It’s not cheap, but overall Koala performed better than expected.
Surfer’s information article did a lot better, but their round-up review wasn’t as good. Their introduction was definitely tighter than Koala and their bullet-point summary is great, but it started to fall apart as it went on. Probably because Koala has a dedicated article template for round-up reviews, but Surfer didn’t at the time. It just felt like chunky paragraph after chunk paragraph.
But the really good thing about Surfer is that it optimises quite well. And it understands some core things that you’d want to see in an article, like summaries and FAQs, and did a better job with those.
Plus, Surfer felt like a more evolved tool because it has a better user interface. But we essentially tested the beta of Surfer against the battle-tested version of Koala here.
And Frase’s round-up review was somewhere in the middle.
AI Content Generation Take-Aways
These tools market themselves as a way to just press one button and get all your content type stuff, but that’s not really the reality.
You could blindly publish any AI generated content, but if everyone can do that, then why do you deserve to rank? Take things a step further with one or two little tweaks and you can make your content pretty decent, especially in lower competition spaces. AI generated content isn’t going to do as well as the modern castles anytime soon, but it’s very promising. And if you can take the kind of real world experience that a specialist writer has and combine it with AI tools to generate content more quickly and easily, then you might be onto a winner there.
The Future of AI Content Generation
There are plenty of tools out now that are implementing AI content creation in them, and they will only keep coming.
But there still needs to be a way to audit that content, like checking to make sure it doesn’t contain false information. Only then can it be published in a well-formatted and clean way, without the fluff.
There’s still work involved at the moment, but eventually it’s going to become part of the process to use some kind of AI to help with these things. There’s certainly an opportunity to build a great reputation with hero pages, and use AI to save resources on the long tail variations or to help you capture traffic.
It’s likely that the content creation process will include AI now forever – it will help you brainstorm, outline, and write compelling content. So get in the game now, if you haven’t already.
But Google seems determined to make more aggressive updates, as they’ve outlined with this new helpful content update. It will bring real human content to the surface, not because it’s written by humans, but because it has real experience in there, and that’s what they’re looking for.
So there’s going to be a fine line between not falling into the hype and not being left behind.
