There is a serious flaw in how most people understand artificial intelligence (AI). It is a flaw that has permeated nearly every aspect of modern life and business, including my line of work: SEO and digital marketing. What is the flaw? The false assumption that AI is a self-sustaining creator. It is not.
We’ve been tricked into falsely believing AI’s self-sustaining nature by endless AI-generated images, videos, blog posts, etc. Even much of what we now consider hard news is fully or partially generated by AI. But the reality of AI is that it’s not an information source. Rather, it is an information mirror.
Fast but Functionally Limited
AI’s biggest strength is the speed at which it can synthesize information. But where does that information come from? Remember that computers and algorithms cannot legitimately think. They can only do what they are programmed to do. And in the case of AI, that means curating information. The information needs to come from somewhere. Enter human content creators.
As the SEO in digital marketing industries rely more heavily on AI – whether to save money, time, or both – they run the risk of directly contributing to their own demise through service degradation. Another way to put it is this: increasing AI-produced content in favor of its human-produced counterpart will eventually degrade both SEO and digital marketing quality.
Model Collapse Is a Real Thing
As a content creator, I am very concerned about SEO and digital marketing providers turning to generative AI more often than human creators. When I’m asked, I often respond by saying that AI will eventually eat itself. What do I mean by that?
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In the AI space, one of the chief concerns is something known as model collapse. Note that model collapse isn’t just a theory. It is reality. As IBM puts it, “model collapse refers to the declining performance of generative AI models that are trained on AI-generated content.”
Let’s say half of all SEO and digital marketing firms turn the majority of their content creation over to generative AI. That content gets unleashed on the internet. The next time a firm needs to produce content on the same topic, its AI tools include previously AI-generated content in their curation. In the absence of any new human-generated content, AI tools simply feed off their past work.
In the short term, users notice nothing. But given enough time, they eventually discover that their internet searches are not producing anything new, relevant, or valuable. And once Google and its competitors figure it out, they start punishing websites that don’t offer value.
AI Is a Limited Tool
AI can be a useful tool in both SEO and digital marketing. San Diego-based Pixsan Solutions says it’s fantastic for helping creators come up with content ideas. It’s very useful for research and statistics, scanning long and complicated documents, and better understanding topics that would otherwise be out of reach. But AI is not a substitute for human thinking, creativity, and nuance.
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If AI is to survive, humans must continue contributing new data. Humans do the thinking that fuels AI-driven activities. Humans provide the context, nuance, and creativity that computers cannot possibly replicate.
If your organization is relying heavily on generative AI to produce your content, know this: you will probably save time and money in the short term. But in the long term, reliance on AI tools will come back to bite you. Generative AI cannot survive without human input. That input comes from content creators who can actually think, feel, reason, and put everything together in a way that appeals to other humans.
