Disclosure: I have not accessed the text AI generators at this point in time.
04 March 2023
The summary: my employer had a knee-jerk reaction to AI generated text, in particular Chat GPT. This resulted in our phones being taken away, leaving me loosing an entire weekend as I had to seek immediate legal advice. I explained the effect this was having on my life both on social media and in a blog post. I don’t have the time to repeat it. The reasoning my employer gave for this is that Google will blacklist any website caught using the AI to generate text. This turns out not to be true. So they had a knee-jerk reaction to something that isn’t true.
This is how Google’s stance from their own “Google Search Essentials”. Google themselves posted this in a blog on the 8th of February 2023. My employer announced their new policies on the 23rd of February, gaslighting anyone with friends who lost their content writing jobs to the AI.
They reward high-quality content, regardless of whether it is written by a human being or generated by AI with higher ranking (which, unfortunately for me, is different to Youtube’s algorithm). This content should also be original – so no ripping off (plagiarising) other websites, even if you own the other website. I will eventually get up a post about how the AI learns, but it is prone to plagiarism, much like the AI art generators. Humans plagiarise too.
This is what google looks for when ranking websites:
E – Expertise
E - Experience
A – Authoritativeness
T – Trustworthiness
What this means is that Google doesn’t give a cyber-shit about how the content is produced as long as it benefits people and not our robot overlords. And isn't online to just get hits off the keywords.
If you are using AI to generate text (as a writer, I really wish you wouldn’t, but the tech bros unleashed that one and there’s no going back), you will need to edit it and fact check it. Just like you have to have an editor for a writer producing the content with the same set of keywords.
Real human writers can fall foul of the same things that the AI generator text can. I’m particularly bad for not making sense if the PTSD I suffer with is triggered.
When you are creating content for Google rankings:
Okay, it is time to cook dinner. A post about SEO is going to have to wait. And I will demonstrate how to write a good post, how to write a bad post and how humans and AI can both screw these up (without using the AI). I did hit up Semrush already for some astrology keywords. Then there's obviously the links and other things that impact where google ranks your website. I'm trying to keep this relevant to writers who may have been replaced by AI so the links may not be relevant, which is why I don't really mention them on here. Seeing demonstrations of how badly human writers can screw up, especially with outside generated or gifted stress and mental health illness flare-ups and how that compares to AI samples is deemed useful (even if I can't access the AI text generators until my employer comes to their senses or I have a new job lined up or I'm signed off work). I haven't even had the time to tell you how Windows updates are now adding the Chat GPT to the task bar which makes my employer taking away our phones to prevent AI usage even more pointless (you know, maybe having an anti-AI policy instead of a knee-jerk reaction and actually communicating with us would have worked better).
04 March 2023
The summary: my employer had a knee-jerk reaction to AI generated text, in particular Chat GPT. This resulted in our phones being taken away, leaving me loosing an entire weekend as I had to seek immediate legal advice. I explained the effect this was having on my life both on social media and in a blog post. I don’t have the time to repeat it. The reasoning my employer gave for this is that Google will blacklist any website caught using the AI to generate text. This turns out not to be true. So they had a knee-jerk reaction to something that isn’t true.
This is how Google’s stance from their own “Google Search Essentials”. Google themselves posted this in a blog on the 8th of February 2023. My employer announced their new policies on the 23rd of February, gaslighting anyone with friends who lost their content writing jobs to the AI.
They reward high-quality content, regardless of whether it is written by a human being or generated by AI with higher ranking (which, unfortunately for me, is different to Youtube’s algorithm). This content should also be original – so no ripping off (plagiarising) other websites, even if you own the other website. I will eventually get up a post about how the AI learns, but it is prone to plagiarism, much like the AI art generators. Humans plagiarise too.
This is what google looks for when ranking websites:
E – Expertise
E - Experience
A – Authoritativeness
T – Trustworthiness
What this means is that Google doesn’t give a cyber-shit about how the content is produced as long as it benefits people and not our robot overlords. And isn't online to just get hits off the keywords.
If you are using AI to generate text (as a writer, I really wish you wouldn’t, but the tech bros unleashed that one and there’s no going back), you will need to edit it and fact check it. Just like you have to have an editor for a writer producing the content with the same set of keywords.
Real human writers can fall foul of the same things that the AI generator text can. I’m particularly bad for not making sense if the PTSD I suffer with is triggered.
When you are creating content for Google rankings:
- Is it coherent? Does your audience know what the fuck you are on about?
- Is it comprehensive? Or are there gaps missing (like in this webpage, I will be putting up more as I have time)?
- Does it offer insight to the person that clicked on it? Are they going to get the information they need, or is this website purely to sell a product or service? I think working in marketing, I sometimes get really turned off by the fact that nearly every webpage is selling you something these days. Even personal websites like this one are still selling you things and when I’m posting on it, sometimes I’m still in marketing and advertising mode and not in author and artist mode. And that does affect how I write.
- If you are using outside sources for your research, have you simply copied them or have you added something? I’m obviously using an outside source to write this - I fucking linked to it. Google swears a lot less than I do. I’m not running this through a plagiarism checker so I don’t know what it would score on that front (as I already stated, I will have to do an entirely separate page on AI and plagiarism).
- Is your headline clickbait, because (apparently) it really shouldn’t be? So much clickbait, at least on social media. I see less of it on google, minus news headlines. But humans come up with those clickbait headlines.
- Is the content valuable when compared to similar webpages? Well, this is explaining AI to creatives. Most AI pages that I’ve looked at have been focused on businesses replacing their workforce with AI. Let’s hope that stops happening.
- Can you trust the information (next time I see a conspiracy theory on Google’s first page from innocent search terms, I’m going to send it to a friend and see if she can figure out how these conspiracy theories are ranking highly)?
- Is it accurate? This is something the AI is having trouble with right now. But this is also something people have trouble doing. Sometimes it is accidental, like with cognitive biases. But other times, it is purposely misleading, like Fox News, which in turn, creates cognitive biases in its viewers.
- Do you know this topic well? Again, a human may not have the faintest clue what they are talking about and might just be regurgitating big words they read on another website with their SEO (search engine optimisation) keywords thrown in for fun. Like me when my PTSD is all flared up. My social media posts of this past week probably didn’t make all that much sense.
- This is the one that really gets me with the high ranking conspiracy theories – “Does the content have any easily-verified factual errors?” Well, Karen, I doubt wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers or that Paul McCartney died and was replaced and it is all explained in the lyrics of “I Am The Walrus”. I would call both of those easily-verified factual errors, regardless of whether or not the first one is a quote and the second one is one of the old-skool silly conspiracies. It is still putting that idea out there.
- Spelling. Yeah because Yanks think everyone apart from them spells things wrong. Right now, I’m arguing over the dictionary on Word for Mac, which apparently has been resetting to USA English (or bastardised English as a lot of us call it) for at least twenty years now. It has even done it on this document (knew I should have used Google Docs for this one). So, spelling is a bit subjective depending on where you are and what your website is. Some websites are going to use a lot of slang and how much of that is spelt right?
- Is it well produced or hastily thrown onto the page with some scattered in keywords in hopes of getting some hits? Again, humans fall foul of this too. The amount of times I’ve thrown up a blog post because I’m busy but need to let my readers know something. Granted, this website isn't going to use keywords. It is for people who actually know who I am already.
- Is it mass-produced? Basically are a ton of freelancers spewing out content or having the AI spit out a ton of stuff? And then is this shit spread across too many pages? PS. I did not look up keywords for this webpage. I should know better, but I don’t look up keywords for my website. The only way you are typically going to stumble across it, is because you want to be on it. Which is why, when I can access the AI, I will be doing a separate webpage which will have nothing to do with my work as an author and artist and everything to do with demonstrating AI and good marketing copy and bad marketing copy. I've never had a guest post on here either (maybe that'll change one day).
- Are there too many ads? This can be a few different things. For example, at the end of this sentence, I could put: I write about the dangers of social media in 56 Seconds. Buy my book and give me a review. Then at the end of the next thought, I could put: Check out Ketamine Addicted Pandas, on godless now. A lot of webpages are there to sell us shit. While researching how the AI generators work, nearly every website I went on was selling internet security. Some of these left it to the bottom few paragraphs. Some of these were trying to get you to buy their product every few sentences. Either of those is fine, but sometimes websites will be trying to sell you more than one thing. I’ll get to that shortly. What isn't fine is a lot of ads on your page for outside products. I don't have the time right now to talk about links and hacking, but outside links can present problems. I probably haven't explained that in the best way. But there is a certain ill-tempered conspiracy theorist whose website I have to go on before speaking to some of my family members so I know what shit I'll be dealing with (think like how I used to check headlines in both the Guardian and the Daily Mail) and that sack of shit has a ton of affiliate links right there on the home page.
- Is it well displayed on mobile devices? I usually post my links and update my social media from my phone. There seems to be some Safari versus Weebly problems when I add a video, but that’s about it. A lot of websites consider mobile these days as not everyone owns a computer.
- Does your audience find your posts useful? Well, I hope my website is useful to the people that buy my books. But my website, is usually me shouting into the void. I don’t have a paid website so I can’t see full analytics so I don’t know how many strays end up here thinking ‘what the actual fuck did I just click on’. As with my YouTube algorithm problems, I work in marketing and should know better. But the website is there for people who read my books and buy my art. The URL is listed in each of my self published books and my linktree connects my website, amazon author pages, godless author pages and social media. The blogs on it allow me to talk directly to my audience without really having to talk about books. Surprisingly readers do care about what goes on in my life. New authors like to see they aren’t alone in what obstacles they may have to overcome. Stuff like that.
- Are you posting first-hand knowledge? Well, I am on this website. But, way back in my freelancing days, I would get so excited if I was asked to create a post for a product I actually used. It made my life easier. But I have written for products and services that I had no idea existed until they landed in my inbox.
- Is there a focus behind your website? This one is obviously all about me. My books, my art, little bits of my personal life. So that’s pretty focused. But a lot of websites these days are literally selling you products or services. Do these websites jump around and try to sell you various items that are completely unrelated? Like baby clothes and sex toys. Those two don’t go together and outside of Amazon, shouldn’t be sold on the same website. Plus amazon is a market place. A market place is very different to a website that is meant to be informative. So is the website you are on showing you both baby clothes and sex toys?
- Will someone come away from your website having learned something? Even though the sites I went on to learn about the AI were selling me something, I did come away knowing how the AI is taught to generate texts and art (I still haven’t looked into how music is generated).
Okay, it is time to cook dinner. A post about SEO is going to have to wait. And I will demonstrate how to write a good post, how to write a bad post and how humans and AI can both screw these up (without using the AI). I did hit up Semrush already for some astrology keywords. Then there's obviously the links and other things that impact where google ranks your website. I'm trying to keep this relevant to writers who may have been replaced by AI so the links may not be relevant, which is why I don't really mention them on here. Seeing demonstrations of how badly human writers can screw up, especially with outside generated or gifted stress and mental health illness flare-ups and how that compares to AI samples is deemed useful (even if I can't access the AI text generators until my employer comes to their senses or I have a new job lined up or I'm signed off work). I haven't even had the time to tell you how Windows updates are now adding the Chat GPT to the task bar which makes my employer taking away our phones to prevent AI usage even more pointless (you know, maybe having an anti-AI policy instead of a knee-jerk reaction and actually communicating with us would have worked better).
