ChatGPT’s ability to write human-sounding language is so spectacular that cybercriminals are now using it to produce scam emails. Google let ChatGPT take a test for its Level 3 Engineering position — a job that offers a $183K/annum salary — and the bot passed with flying colors. It also passed four law school exams and gained a US medical license, reports Insider.
However, calling ChatGPT or any other language model AI — artificial intelligence — is a misnomer. These systems have little to no intelligence and work on statistical and probability formulae to predict the next word in a sentence. At best, they are “super-autocomplete” machines.
Those aren’t my words. They belong to Dr. Noam Chomsky, Dr. Ian Roberts, and Dr. Jeffrey Watumull, two linguists and an AI expert who penned an opinion piece in The Times about the misconceptions surrounding this new tool.
That doesn’t mean ChatGPT and its sister model Codex, a language model for writing computer code, don’t have their use cases.
But it’s essential to separate the hype from the factual.
Why the internet is so full of terrible articles
I was fortunate to be asked to write an extensive series on using AI for Content Creation for Fiverr’s official blog. You can have a look at the articles on our samples page. I got to test almost every mainstream AI content-generation tool out there, including image-generation tools.
After working extensively with all these tools, I concluded that the hype is beyond overrated. These tools simply cannot replace human creativity.
They have their uses, and they can improve efficiency to a degree when used properly.
But there’s an element about them that everyone seems to be missing: The Google-created Frankenstein monster that these machines have been fed — mediocre keyword-stuffed content to please the Googlebot.
Why do we think ChatGPT writes so well?
More than two decades after Google began, the internet is now a glutted mess of keyword-stuffed trash that people have written purely to “rank on Google.”
I’ve worked in this industry for nearly as long, first as a web developer and then as an SEO writer. When I wrote for businesses as a freelancer, few wanted “moving, inspiring content.” They wanted “Content that will rank on Google.”
Enter: The SEO Agency. Keyword lists. And contrived outlines with convoluted keyword phrases that no human would want to read.
These outlines were created for the Googlebot. The keywords I was supposed to use were for Googlebot. None of it was for humans.
Sure, sure, Google has been saying for years that we should “Write for humans and not for robots,” but either people never got the message, or Google’s algorithms never got good enough to detect content written for robots.
I think it’s a bit of both.
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I mentioned to one SEO Agency that what they wanted me to write read like keyword-stuffed trash. (I didn’t quite use those words.)
Their answer? “Well, it doesn’t matter, Paulo. We don’t really care what it says, so long as the keywords are used. That’s all Google cares about.”
The result is the tsunami of mediocre content we’re forced to read every day.
Since 2001, people have been pushing meaningless keyword-stuffed drivel out onto the interwebs. And now ChatGPT, grown fat on this drivel, lets you produce 1,000 times more of it, in a fraction of the time.
AI content is a race to the middle
The owner of a high-end content creation agency wrote on LinkedIn a few months ago that AI is not a race to the top but a race to the middle. These tools can’t produce anything but mediocre, regurgitated, rehashed content.
Firstly, let’s stop calling them “AI.” True AI represents a laudable field that has worked for decades to create machines that can think, reason, and emulate human intellect at a high level. Language models do none of that. They do the parlor trick of statistically guessing the next word in a series of words.
It’s an incredible parlor trick, sure. It’s so incredible that ChatGPT is the fastest-adopted tool in the history of the internet.
Unfortunately, because ChatGPT “speaks” so well, we believe it can also think. That’s dangerous. And children using this tool should be thoroughly educated that it can neither think nor feel.
It really is hard for a human to comprehend that a machine can state so many logical facts and yet understand none of them. The answer to that puzzle lies in the phrase “for a human to comprehend.”
We are logical. We think. We recognize anomalies that make us uncomfortable. We have a “gut feel.”
ChatGPT does none of this. It predicts, according to mathematical formulae which word comes next in a sentence and in which subject that sentence should be.
If the question is about physics, will the answer be in the field of biology or physics? The probability is much higher in physics, so ChatGPT goes to its physics canon to get the answer. And so on and so on, narrowing down the probability so well that everyone cheers at what it says.
GPT version 3 was fed on 570 GB of data, equivalent to over 7 billion 1,000-word documents. With that much data to analyze, those statistical predictions are phenomenally accurate. ChatGPT is so good at figuring out what word comes next in a sentence that it can even write computer code, pass exams, and create phishing emails to try and steal people’s money.
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Back in my computer programming days, we had the following maxim drummed into our heads: “Garbage in, garbage out.” In other words, what you feed a computer is what the computer will give back to you.
What has ChatGPT and every other language model been fed? Keyword-stuffed internet drivel that Google insisted we write for over 20 years.
So, when you ask it to write something, it regurgitates the same mediocre content we’ve been forced to read in all that time.
We’ve let the robots rule our words for 20 years. It’s time to bring an end to that cycle.
Using ChatGPT for SEO writing is like using a dirty rag to clean windows
If you don’t believe me, let’s do an experiment. I’ll prompt ChatGPT to “Write a unique article about using AI in content generation — pros and cons.”
ChatGPT writes a 550-word article for me. (Not long enough for SEO, but fine.)
Let’s now mosey on over to Copyleaks’s AI-content detection tool and paste the entire article in there.
Ouch! Copyleaks detects that the content is totally written by AI.
“So what?” you ask.
Well, Google’s latest algorithm update focuses on “Helpful content for people.” Any content that it deems “unhelpful” will be penalized.
How do you think Google will treat content written entirely by a machine that experts know hallucinates?
If you do want to get ChatGPT to help you write, you need to:
- Fact-check what it wrote
- Rewrite it so it reads like it’s written by a human (and sounds better)
Okay, so we’ll edit it. And fact-check it. And rewrite it.
Then why use it in the first place?
Okay, there are some use cases. Let’s look at them:
What ChatGPT is good at
ChatGPT can be an excellent tool provided you know its limitations. If you need answers to things that aren’t mission-critical, ChatGPT can generally provide those answers. Just be prepared to reevaluate their accuracy at some stage in the future.
If you’re already an expert in a subject, you can get ChatGPT to write an opening paragraph for an article to get you started. Because you know the subject, you won’t lose any time fact-checking. You can also then add your personal spin to the article to make it human.
In this sense, ChatGPT is like an intern with rudimentary skills. They get the dirty work done until the real artists arrive to polish it up.
If you’re a programmer, you can use it to write code and then tidy it up. (You should absolutely not use it to write code without getting it side-checked by a coder. The potential security flaws are enormous.)
ChatGPT typically also does well with the following:
- Defining words
- Providing synonyms
- Providing synonyms of a specific tone (for example, ask it to provide a “softer word for fool” or “less accusatory term than misguided”)
- Summarizing articles (copy and paste an article and ask it to highlight the main points) — this is awesome for saving on research time.
- Writing paragraphs about things that have been written about thousands of times before (such as “What is SEO?” and “What is digital marketing?”). Just rewrite everything it spews out and make sure it’s factual.
- Rewording using a specific tone.
- Writing repetitive content that no human should be forced to write. (You can then edit this content and make it more original.)
- Analyzing existing computer code for errors. (Codex is better but hasn’t yet been widely released.)
- How-to articles (just fact-check everything, please).
- Changing sentences into Title Case according to various style manuals, such as Associated Press (AP) style or The Chicago Manual of Style.
- Creating rough outlines
- Clustering a list of keywords
- And a few other use cases
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What ChatGPT is terrible at
ChatGPT is a poor choice if you want to:
- Write like a human
- Write a thought-piece
- Write original content that has never been written before. (Merely rehashing old content is not “original content.”)
- Break the rules — artists learn the rules so we can break them for effect.
- Write provocatively based on experience and human reasoning
- Conduct human reasoning
- Write an article that explores a subject’s intricate and complex human emotions.
- Write a leadership piece
- Come up with original ideas. (It can come up with “ideas” that are rehashes of everything it’s been fed, and sometimes that’s what you want, such as a list of article titles.)
- Write flawless software
- Holding a sensible conversation without apologizing endlessly (even though it doesn’t understand the concept of apology)
- Being a friend
The world needs human-written content more than ever
There are other writing tools. I’ve tested all the mainstream ones: Jasper, Frase.io, Copy.AI, Rytr. All of them produce, in varying degrees of quality, regurgitated content that sounds somewhat disjointed. Some of them are better than others. (ChatGPT is, by leagues, the best at creating somewhat coherent content.)
Their jolting sentences evince that there is no sentience behind those words.
My gut feel tells me that the “shortening attention span” of internet readers has less to do with the quantity of content than it does with its quality.
We’ve played the “write for robots” game for 20 years. We need to bring human-driven quality back to prose, stop worrying about Google rankings, and actually start saying something meaningful when we write, whether personally or for our brands.
Again, With Feeling is a premium content agency providing exquisite prose and moving film footage for your brand. Contact us to tell us about your content needs.
R. Paulo Delgado is a tech writer, journalist, veteran software developer, and CEO of Again, With Feeling.
