Artificial intelligence may sound like something out of science fiction, but it’s been an integral part of our lives for many years now. Google’s search algorithm incorporates artificial intelligence to match users’ search queries with the best possible results. Your email program’s spellchecker is also AI. Both of these have been around for a long time.

More recent developments in artificial intelligence have seen the rise of programs that can do everything from chatting with you like a human would to actually producing written content. ChatGPT is one such artificial intelligence program.

 

Introduction

ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs are set to revolutionize a number of industries. A prominent question is whether or not AI can replace a human writer. The short answer is no. This is because not only is passing off AI-written content as your own considered plagiarism, but that content also may not be of the highest quality. How good ChatGPT’s content can be depends on how you phrase your question or request. Additionally, there are limits to how much an AI can understand human needs.

 

Key Takeaways

• Taking AI-written content and presenting it as your own is plagiarism, whether it’s online or in an academic setting.
• There are limits to ChatGPT’s knowledge and quality that could result in incorrect, offensive, or even harmful content.
• What you get out of ChatGPT depends on what you put in – learning how to phrase a request or a question to get the most out of using the AI platform is a skill unto itself.
• ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to help writers and marketers but it can’t replace the humans involved.

 

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence model that operates in a dialogue format. This means that you can ask ChatGPT questions and provide it with input and get a response. By feeding ChatGPT the right input, you could use it to write a blog post, an essay, a web page, an article, and more.
 

When Was ChatGPT Released?

ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, when it almost immediately began trending online. ChatGPT has had a lot of people talking about what it can do and how much it might change marketing and writing.
 

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT works by sifting through terabytes worth of written content, which amounts to billions of words of writing, in order to find the answer to a question or a response to input from a user. This means that while ChatGPT may respond like a person, it’s limited in what it can say by the content it can access. It can’t create anything new or original like a human can, it can only produce answers based on existing content. ChatGPT is also limited in its access to content because it’s not connected to the Internet as a whole.
 

Can ChatGPT Replace a Human Writer?

According to OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, there are three limitations to ChatGPT:

1. ChatGPT might occasionally provide incorrect information
2. ChatGPT might occasionally provide biased content or harmful instructions
3. ChatGPT might have limited knowledge of events and the world in general after 2021

Keeping these limitations in mind and the fact that ChatGPT is also limited in the input it receives from the content it can access, it’s currently not recommended to use ChatGPT to replace a human writer. ChatGPT and any other AI can “read” billions of words of data, but still not actually understand either the information it’s been given or the people it’s responding to. There are elements of nuance, knowing your audience, and other human experiences that ChatGPT won’t be able to capture in the way a real human would.

 
 

How Do You Use ChatGPT?

To use ChatGPT, go to openai.com and either create an account or log in. If you’re creating an account, you’ll be sent an email to verify your account. You’ll also have to input some personal information, such as your name and your phone number (Open AI will send you a verification code). You’ll then be taken to the main screen of ChatGPT.

Once you’re at ChatGPT’s prompt screen, go ahead and enter your first command or query. A few simple examples are below:

 

Can ChatGPT Be Used to Produce Written Content?

ChatGPT has a variety of uses, from homework help and language translation to shopping and cooking. In the case of writing an essay or writing a blog or article, you could ask ChatGPT questions about your topic and then use its responses. In a blog, for example, headers are often questions. ChatGPT could technically write the blog for you just by answering each of those questions.

It may not be the best idea to use ChatGPT to produce content for you without a human writer to rework the content, however. This is for a variety of reasons, from accuracy to the risk of accidental plagiarism.

 
 

BrainVine’s ChatGPT Test

An AI that can answer questions a writer asks is helpful, but that’s not what might let the program replace a human writer. BrainVine conducted a test with ChatGPT to determine whether it could effectively write for you, not just answer a few questions. Additionally, we wanted to determine whether or not ChatGPT could create written content optimized for SEO, which is a major component of written content on the Internet.
 

Write an Article About Travel

ChatGPT delivered exactly what was asked. We requested an article about travel and that’s what it provided. The article is very general, but so was the request. ChatGPT won’t be able to take a general request like ‘write an article about travel’ and then turn it into something specific. If you want to use ChatGPT to aid in your content strategy, then you’ll need to specifically plan out what you want it to write about. Human writers can come up with their own topics within a certain category, but an AI cannot.
 

Write an Article About Traveling to London

Even with a more specific question, ChatGPT’s response is still very general. This isn’t any information that I couldn’t find out via Google. There’s none of the detail and creativity, or personal experience, that really makes human-written content shine. If I want to know what London is like, ChatGPT isn’t going to answer that question for me. Even asking ChatGPT directly, ‘What is London like?’ results in a response about the food and museums.

 

Write a Blog That Will Help My Jet Charter Website with SEO

With a human writer, you can give them the instruction to write a blog that will help your website with SEO. ChatGPT didn’t understand that instruction and instead of writing an SEO-optimized blog that would help a jet charter company improve its SEO strategy, it instead produced an article making suggestions for how a website can improve its SEO. While these tips, which include keyword research and optimizing your website structure, are helpful, they’re not what was requested.

This suggests that ChatGPT may be able to write, but it a) doesn’t always accurately understand what the person inputting a question or request actually wants and b) cannot optimize your content for SEO. Any mention of SEO may result in an article about SEO. Additionally, the fact that it doesn’t have access to data from after 2021 means that any tips it has about SEO are outdated in an industry that moves incredibly quickly.
 

Write a User-Friendly Article That Will Help My Jet Charter Website with SEO

Asking for a user-friendly article that’s helpful for a jet charter company’s SEO produced an actual article rather than just SEO tips. The quality of ChatGPT’s answer does depend on how well you phrase your request. Using ChatGPT is a skill unto itself and it, therefore, requires some time and practice to properly learn how to use the tool.
 

Write an SEO-Optimized Article for a Private Jet Charter Website

For this test, we directly asked ChatGPT to optimize the article for SEO. The earlier article in which we asked for a user-friendly article with SEO was better optimized with keywords pertaining to private jet travel in the header and a numbered list. This article would need to be optimized after the fact.
 

Can ChatGPT Produce Your Written Content?

At first glance, it looks like ChatGPT could be a cheap and fast way to generate written content. You might think that it could replace the need to hire a human writer or keep a writer on staff. However, that’s not quite the case. ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence programs are intended to be tools to aid writing, not to be the writer.
 

Why Shouldn’t You Use ChatGPT to Produce Your Written Content?

You can definitely use ChatGPT as a resource, but it shouldn’t function as your writer. Sure, it can generate an article if you tell it to, but Open AI only allows ChatGPT access to certain content. This means limitations in the information that it can provide and the risk of inaccuracies and even bias because ChatGPT doesn’t understand what is offensive and what is not.

On top of that, it’s usually pretty obvious when something has been written by an AI. And when your written content is intended to be used as part of an SEO campaign, you should know that AI can recognize what is written by other AI.
 

How Can You Tell Something Has Been Written by AI?

Artificial intelligence-written content tends to be simpler than human-written content. The vocabulary tends to be more repetitive and the sentence structure is less complex. AI also just isn’t as creative as a human and has no ability to be original. Plus, Google and other search engines are able to detect AI-generated content, which can impact your SEO.

If you look at the above article examples, you may also notice that the depth of research just isn’t there. What’s more, the user experience (UX) isn’t considered in any notable way. There are no subtitles, no bullet lists, no numbers – nothing to help the user skim through the content for what they’re most interested in.
 

Can You Use ChatGPT for SEO?

AI-generated content from a program like ChatGPT impacts your SEO negatively primarily if you use them as a replacement for a human writer. Google can recognize when content is AI-written and while Google’s latest update revealed that the search engine won’t penalize content written by an AI just because it’s written by an AI, that doesn’t mean that using exclusively AI-written content is actually good for your SEO.
 

Does Google Penalize AI-Written Content in Search Rankings?

In the past, Google would penalize content written entirely by an AI with lower rankings in its SERPs. However, shortly after the release of ChatGPT, Google issued an announcement that revealed it would no longer lower the rankings for AI-written content just for being written by an AI. However, that doesn’t mean AI-written content won’t rank lower than human-written content due to other factors, such as quality or SEO optimization.
 

Can ChatGPT Optimize for SEO?

On its own, ChatGPT doesn’t appear to optimize for SEO the way that Google describes as high-quality. AI-written content isn’t likely to fulfill EEAT, for example. Just because Google isn’t penalizing content for being AI-written doesn’t mean that it’s not still going to focus heavily on promoting high-quality content that displays expertise, authority, trustworthiness, and, its newest addition, experience. AI has no experience with anything in the real world. It can only look through content that humans have produced for answers.
 

Is Using AI Plagiarism?

Using an AI to write your content for you is plagiarism, even though the author of the content isn’t human. Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own, even if that someone isn’t actually living. This is why the academic world is cracking down so hard on students’ use of AI in writing essays.

In fact, the makers of ChatGPT have produced software that can detect whether something was written by an AI or not to mitigate the effects of people using ChatGPT. In fact, they’re also taking steps to include a watermark on anything produced by ChatGPT so that it’s easier to spot.
 

Is Plagiarism Bad for SEO?

The moral and legal implications of plagiarism aside, it’s also bad for SEO. This is because, with an AI, you can’t guarantee that someone else didn’t ask the exact same question and get the same answer. When Google detects that there is duplicate content, it doesn’t know which page to send viewers to, causing both to drop in rankings because they’re essentially splitting the views between them. With a popular topic, the views could be split even further.
 

Can AI-Written Content Provide a Good User Experience?

UX plays a major role in SEO because it doesn’t matter how well your content is optimized if users don’t like it, don’t find it useful, or otherwise don’t want to stay on your site. Google measures a good user experience with things like dwell time and bounce rate, figuring that if someone spends a lot of time on your site, then they must have found the experience valuable in some way.

While content from ChatGPT is definitely written in comprehensible, natural-sounding English, it isn’t necessarily going to provide an excellent user experience of the type that would help with your SEO.
 

Can ChatGPT Produce High-Quality Content?

AI-written content has been described as “a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense” or “an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures” by Benedict Evans, a technology analyst. When you read through content produced by an AI, that comparison seems to fit. In our test of ChatGPT, we did notice that the content was rather thin, filled with easily-Googleable answers rather than the creativity and analysis that you would expect from a good human writer.

At the moment, AI-written content just doesn’t compare in terms of quality to that produced by a human writer. If you’re interested in earning the top rankings on Google SERPs, then relying on AI-produced content is not going to get you there, even without Google purposely penalizing AI content.
 

What AI Tools Can Improve SEO?

There is a Google Chrome extension that works with ChatGPT called AIPRM. When you add this extension to your browser, it adds a lot of different features to ChatGPT that can help you with SEO, from your keyword strategy to examining your competitors’ content for ways to improve upon it (so you can rank better).

 

While ChatGPT may not have been able to produce high-quality, well-optimized content entirely on its own with no human input, there are a lot of tools that can utilize ChatGPT to aid human writers in better optimizing their work.
 

Conclusion

ChatGPT is an incredible tool that can help with both writing and SEO. However, it can’t take the place of a real human doing the work. This is both out of concerns of plagiarism and the fact that an AI isn’t capable of understanding the nuances of human communication. AI-written articles may look good on the surface but typically can’t achieve the depth that human-written content can. How well ChatGPT works as a tool for you, however, does depend on how well you phrase your question or request and there may be a learning curve to take full advantage of its capabilities.