AI is infesting the content world. As of 2024, a tenth of all content is created by AI. That figure is growing fast, with an annual growth rate of 31.2%. 

Already in 2016, more than half of all content was never read—even when it was shared—& that was before AI. We can be certain that readability has continued to decrease since then.

AI Content regarding SEO

AI might dominate for swarming search engine pages—& that was before Google’s new generative search AI—but the results don’t last. While keyword count & index size are crucial, search engine rankings are maintained by many factors—time spent on the page, distance scrolled, clickthrough, & more. AI cannot—yet—satisfy these standards.

This is well-known, so why do so many invest in AI for content production? Another big factor in SEO is basically paid-placement. Those invested in AI content know they can profit from its flash-in-pan results by paying for clicks. This can be used to increase general site ranking, expedite traffic to a central body of organic content, or simply collect leads more directly.

Effective, but no substitute for organic content. An in any case of quantity versus quality; quick results cannot sustain. Content-driven businesses must grow from a central body of organic content—whether they’re currently using AI or not. Any claims of some AI-written, content-driven ‘passive income’ are dubious.

& what about Google’s new AI search engine? It’s been said that search engines have had toxic results, & AI seems to be the next step in this degeneration. SEO was already an arms race for attention where money & marketing mattered more than quality content—the only party winning this arms race is Google. Maybe AI will replace SEO as Google’s next big cash grab, maybe something else will. Regardless, the AI search results will become the same game of pay-for-publicity that SEO has become.

AI Content regarding journalism

AI—as a content creator, at least—is like a dishwasher. It can speed up monotonous, mindless bulk work. Anything fed into it must be mostly-cleaned beforehand, & outputs must be reviewed constantly to catch unwanted omissions & additions.

Although AI might seem limitless in its information sources, it cannot discern. It has nothing to discern with or through. Its imitation of discernment is spoon-fed through algorithms. As we see with Google’s new search AI, this faux-discernment is extremely limited. AI cannot discern satire, irony, metaphor, implication, symbolism, etc., from the literal meaning of its words.

It is not clear how these limitations could be crossed, as artificial intelligence does not actually have any intelligence; the subjective experience we all share. Without this shared experience, we couldn’t identify concepts at all—much less fabricate them into language. Consider if there were no such experience; what then could be shared, identified, fabricated, & only then recorded? If such records are the sole source of artificial ‘intelligence,’ what discernment could it ever really have?

Add to that AI’s frequent production of inaccurate or completely false information & sources: Due to AI being largely a guessing-game based on (algorithmically sorted) relevant data, it is not certain when its habits of producing misinformation will be reliably fixed.

Obviously, this isn’t favorable for journalism. Add to that the fact that readers are losing interest in long-form content. Its reputation for filler language is only going to get worse with AI. Anyone who’s tried writing a graded paper using AI is familiar with how vague, repetitive, & often pointless its sentences can be.

Many journalists have found success in adopting Tweet-style aphoristic writing, breaking out of this reputation. A factor of this—intentional or not—is that it relies more heavily on relatable context than knowledge alone. This serves as a demonstration—or confirmation—of the author’s humanity. In short; AI will never be able to replicate a @birdbath tweet.