Have you noticed a trend of social media updates sharing the ‘success’ of AI generated content? I have. Loads of it. It normally amounts to something like:
This faceless YouTube channel made (unrealistic revenue) in (unrealistic time frame) through using (list of too many AI tools).
Most of the time, I can only deem the ‘poster’ of such statements hasn’t got a clue – for the fact is short vertical video content doesn’t make its creators very much money directly from advertising. If it was that easy, money would be growing from digital trees. It really isn’t.
However, this does imply that there will be more competition for attention. If a creator can gain any kind of traction through using AI tools, and produce much more information much more quickly, then how can creators not using such approaches realistically compete?
A window of opportunity for AI Content?
But unfortunately for the AI only creators, there’s an eclipsing window of opportunity for AI generated content being given prioritisation by search and social algorithms. Meta and YouTube have already brought out AI labelling tools for videos on their platforms prior to the US Presidential Election – and while there’s not much evidence of content being downgraded because of labelling, we’re still quite early in terms of what can be produced by generative AI, particularly in video’s case.
It’s not very logical that high quality content created by hours of human craft and authority will consistently lose out to AI generated content. We may well find ourselves in a world of two algorithmic tiers – content without AI labelling, and that with it.
AI is designed to be human like
Google, along with many other algorithms, is currently having a hard time differentiating between AI generated and human created content in its index. That makes sense, because a chatbot like ChatGPT pretty much has a mission to make its output appear human, so it can assist humans with their productivity. An adjoined problem is that a vast amount of content on the web, which competes for rankings for the most commercially valuable terms, is in fact anonymous.
Indeed, if you look across ecommerce domains and read product copy, you’d be hard pressed to find an author taking credit for their work. It sounds almost ridiculous – do you really need an author stamp next to a product description of a washing machine? On the front end, probably not, but there are still signals that could point to proper authorship markup.
Why is this necessary? It’s all rather easy for a company to use the ChatGPT API to generate millions of words at fractional cost of using human authors.
The problem here is, with such vast amounts of content, is anyone able to check the objective detail? Does it currently matter if anyone does? We’re likely to enter an age where a certain percentile of website copy simply can’t be trusted, because it is anonymous.
If no human has reviewed the content and marked it as such, how can we really trust it? Those pages with such markup are surely much more trustworthy. We need to consider, has a human reviewed the content, and are they willing to put their name to it? If they are, would this expertise be more valuable?
Is Rel=Author due a comeback?
Google’s rel=”author” experiment disappeared in 2014 with the demise of Google+, and the issue that very few website owners were implementing it.
However, that’s not to say it abandoned the author scheme altogether. In 2021, Google added an author URL property to uniquely identify the authors of articles.
But problematically, a qualified journalist publishing on a topic they have spent a decade writing about for a national newspaper, starting up their own new blog, stands little chance of ranking against a non expert writing on a website with a much stronger link profile.
Historically, Google has done a pretty bad job overall accrediting qualified and authoritative journalists over bloggers and startups, which is partially the reason why so many ex-journalists headed for Substack over creating their own blogs in the last 5-6 years.
When we add anonymous AI generated content into this quandary, Google has the potential to become a much worse product, increasingly filling with anonymous AI content.
The drive to the individual
Elsewhere on the web, the drive is towards the individual over the anonymous and faceless. The biggest YouTube accounts are by individuals, not publishers or broadcasters, while Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, has publicly said that the algorithm will favour individual creators over publishers over the long term.
This isn’t to say publishers and aggregators are doomed – just that they are not preferred. Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, there’s been a strong trend towards personal branding leading company marketing. The business of Gen-Z is increasingly individualistic, with the founder often being a creator.
Authority will be prioritised through identity
So in my opinion, the prioritisation of expertise and authority in both search and social will collide out of necessity. The author, like the creator, will become a much more important ranking factor.
Expertise and knowledge will be needed to be added to product pages as much as articles, and users will be all the better for it. Copy will become less anonymous, writers will be more accredited, and perhaps we’ll see a resurgence of objective journalism. Or is this all just wishful thinking?
