It didn’t take long for AI generated content to flood LinkedIn – it is so, so obvious. My favourite? Aussie businesses talking about being working ‘moms.’ It would be laughable if it weren’t so brand damaging…
I know there are a lot of advocates for using AI to ‘write’ for your brand. That’s not me. The very idea of it makes my skin crawl for many, many reasons. Outsourcing your critical thinking and the joy that comes with that for the sake of productivity is just depressing all round.
In short, here’s why I’ll never suggest using these systems to create content:
- It’s bad for SEO
- It’s devoid of personality
- It’s bad for confirmation bias
- It’s brand damaging through loss of trust
- It’s churning and burning low value content which means it’s flooding the Internet with crap, making it even more of a cesspit.
And that’s the short version! Here’s a smidge more depth of thought:
These systems are made unethically. They’re trained on what they refer to as ‘data’ but make no mistake, the data is intellectual property. AKA writing that other people have sank their time, energy and intellect into creating.
A side step to this is to ask where has this ‘data’ come from? It’s Western white experience and history that’s being sucked up and will be spat out to make emails, social captions and long form content. In other words, it’s reductive, it has an implicit bias and at the crux of things it’s plagiarising. It’s taking other people’s work, their intellectual property, their hours upon hours (upon hours upon hours) of research, expertise, thinking, processing and tap, tap, tapping and turned into ‘data’. As they say in the classics, eww David. I’ve had my work stolen before – even my Year 12 History assessment task – and it’s a terrible feeling, but at least those people made the effort of copying and pasting.
In terms of automation – I get that writing isn’t everyone’s thing. I know that people go into business to share their expertise and that might have nothing to do with content marketing. I also understand that we all want to do more with every day BUT know that if you’re ‘creating content’ using AI you’re part of a bigger picture and that is stealing other people’s blood, sweat and tears. It’s also a technology that’s stealing people’s innate ability to grow and develop as writers but also as humans. Why? To spend less time writing social media captions? Seriously? On that – if you have a business coach that’s suggesting these tools as a productivity hack maybe question their depth and perhaps even their integrity. As Holden Sheppard, an Australian novelist says ‘AI is removing meaningful, joyful work – art itself – the essence of our humanity, to our collective horror and dismay. AI is this generation’s asbestos. All evidence and expert advice points to it being dangerous to humans and it is antithetical to the existence of contemporary, working artists.’
It’s not a good idea for so many reasons – I’m happy to chat alternatives, but save your energy in trying to convert me. It’ll never happen.