It’s challenging to look at any news site or social media feed without seeing a mention of AI. Depending on your preferences (usually collected by cookies), it may be about the benefits of AI, how to use it to be more efficient, or how it harms creatives.
Writing is an Art, So AI Imitation Lacks
Like many creative businesses, Silver Magie took a hit when ChatGPT exploded into popular consciousness but has regained many of those clients. The reason is simple, what AI can currently deliver is not all it’s cracked up to be.
Many clients have commented, “Yeah, it’s great, but it has limits.” A client summarized it along the lines of using AI being like them hiring a first-year intern whose work someone more senior had to rewrite part of before they could publish.
Writing is an art form, not a hard-wired data set. Even when someone asks AI to mimic a specific style, it’s not the same as if an actual human wrote it, even if it is normal at first glance.
In many cases, even the best AI has to deal with the uncanny valley effect. While it’s more common to think of the uncanny valley effect in relation to hyperrealistic androids, it can also apply to almost anything AI creates.
SEO is More than Numbers
At last check, the Google SEO algorithms weigh over 200 factors to determine where a website ranks on a given keyword. Most of these factors are not public, which is part of why content creation strategies vary so much.
However, it is abundantly clear that while hard data numbers like SEO keyword ratios to content length are a factor, they are not the only ones. Things like time on the page, which is a measure of engaging content, also matter.
AI can do some of these things exceptionally well. Others, it’s still learning, like writing to a specific audience. However, the more-than-numbers nature of SEO means AI cannot yet deliver the same results a human can.
The Ethical Gray Zone with AI
Unfortunately, AI is an ethical gray zone. In part, it’s due to how it is created. Other ethical considerations include claiming the work, the hiccup hallucinations, and pricing. All of these fall in a gray area.
In order to train AI to deliver competent language, for example, developers need massive datasets of well-written and edited language. Books are an obvious example since anyone who’s been on the internet knows it’s not a well-edited domain. Unfortunately, this has been and continues to be a gray area since it’s often done without the authors’ consent.
Another thing is claiming the work. It’s a grey area in copyright since, technically, putting in the parameters qualifies as creation, but that person didn’t create each word or image. Therefore, can we really claim it as our own work?
Another area is AI hallucinations. Unfortunately, a hallucination is when AI produces information that looks real but is not actually. One of the cases that made the news was this one, where it actually made up legal cases.
All the Pending Lawsuits
At this point, there are also pending lawsuits against AI platforms. The results of these will determine the future usability of the technology, as well as its boundaries. We do not want ourselves or our clients to wait on the outcome of these cases, which could end up with broad-reaching consequences.
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