In this episode of the Opinionated SEO, I discuss the capabilities of and implications of ChatGPT, the free AI-based service from Open AI. I break down what GPT is, what it’s good and bad at, how to craft requests correctly, and how to avoid detection from search engine algorithms.
I believe that GPT offers great potential as a tool, but should never be trusted to replace human content writers, especially for investigative reporting.
Main Topics Covered:
- Overview of Chat GPT
- What Chat GPT Is Good At
- What Chat GPT Is Bad At
- How To Craft Requests
- Avoiding Detection from Search Engines
- Implications for Content Writing & SEO
- The Key to Ensuring AI Content is Unique and Not Detectable
Run over to open AI, take a look at ChatGPT.
It’s free right now, and unless it’s under heavy load, you can pretty much use it just like their OpenAI tool like their playground site. Right now, the quality is really good, and this is making people consider AI as a replacement for a content writer.
Overview of Chat GPT
So what is ChatGPT? ChatGPT is an interface to open AI’s model DaVinci 3.5. 3.5 was just released recently. It was version 3.0, which was really good. This is even better, but then they’ve trained this model using this chat GPT interface to work much more conversationally, much more like a dialogue, allowing it to answer follow-up questions, chatGPT can remember some of the things that you’ve asked. So there’s some train of thought to it. It also can challenge you if you have some incorrect premises and it can admit mistakes. Because of that, it works really great in a question and answer format. In a chat type format.
What Chat GPT Is Good and Bad At
It’s not good for factual data. If I wanted it to tell me what the hours were for a restaurant. That’s not the kind of data it has. It’s still trained on the same data that goes to June of 2021. So we’re talking 18 months old, so it doesn’t have anything in the last about year and a half.
What can it do well though, things like fixing code. So if you have code and it has an error, you can actually paste that code in and say, what is going wrong with my code and help debug it. It can actually help tell you what areas you need to fix. And so it’s turning into this very different almost search engine replacement or forum replacement. Now you’ve got places like stack overflow. Which are saying, you cannot use it to answer questions. You have to come up with your own original answers, because what people started doing is they were taking people’s questions, copying and pasting it into chatGPT, and getting those answers and pasting them back in and trying to get points for it.
And as great as that is, it’s using an AI tool for that, and they want it to be original content.
What’s different with ChatGPT and Other AI Content Tools?
Really what’s different with chatGPT, is that the model has really been tweaked so that the phrasing and the conversation feel very realistic, but there are limitations. They don’t allow certain things like you can’t say, how do I bully someone? How do I make a bomb? These kinds of things, it’ll come back and say, we’re sorry, you can’t do that. There are some ways around it. , and some people are trying all kinds of things in the end. If you really need that kind of information, you’re going to have to go directly to the API, but it’s not going to be trained in the same way as chat GPT is.
And this is what I think the biggest differentiator, the training model that they used. The language model that they’ve developed for dialogue is really just that much better. OpenAI is calling chat GPT, a sibling model to instruct GPT, which is trained on following instructions in a prompt to provide detail responses. So it’s really interesting. It takes a lot of their learnings that they have, and builds on it.
Implications for Content Writing, Marketing, & SEO
But people are now starting to get a little bit worried. If this were to replace a writer, what does that mean for marketing and for SEO and actually search engine journal did a whole piece on it and they tried to answer a few things and they said, you know, what can chat GBT do.
What can’t it do? Really what they’re saying is. It’s AI generated content when it comes down to it, they’re not designed to do specific tasks, but they’re tried to have general knowledge. And so if you have a very kind of niche, Thing or there’s something that only a few people have answers. There’s not a lot of data on the internet about it. It’s not going to be able to give you those kinds of answers. A couple of things that you do need to know is that it is not a reliable source of information. You have to still fact check it. It doesn’t know everything perfectly, and sometimes it makes things up.
So an example that someone had given was, you asked a question about a person, where did this person get their first job. Now, this person may not have their first job posted online anywhere, but chat GPT kind of made up what it thought would be the type of first job that they would have. And that person said, you know what that sounds about like my first job, but it wasn’t with that company.
And so it, it almost creates like a story out of it, the other thing is it doesn’t know about things really after that June, 2021. So anything in the last about 18 months right now, we’re at the end of 2022. It does not have that information. So anything that happened recently, It gets kind of interesting when you start asking you about things that maybe happened 12, 18 months ago or even 24 months ago. Because it doesn’t have a lot of data on it.
ChatGPT also does have some unique biases. It’s not perfectly neutral by design, so you have to just kind of accept that it tends to be a little bit more positive and removes a lot of the negativity in its responses, which may make it less factual. It may make thing sound better or more positive than they were.
How To Craft Requests to Get the Best AI Content?
The other thing is it does need detailed instructions. The more specific you get, the better the answer is going to be. So you really have to spend some time crafting it.
And this is what we’ll probably start seeing more and more in content writers and copy editors. It is going to be an art form on how you craft these requests to the AI tool. You ask it to do things in a certain voice, in a certain tone, in a certain way. You see that with Jasper as an example, they have these different, kind of recipes, so to speak and it’s all of these different variables that go into it to create a certain type of response. And once you start creating those, you end up getting some really great results and you can start getting similar type results over and over for different areas that you’re trying to do.
Can AI Content be Detected by Google, and Avoiding Detection from Search Engines
Can chatGPT content be identified by Google? I went into this a little bit into detailed on the GPT 3 Article Can AI Content Rank, can it not be identified now? GPT2 can be, It’s pretty easy to identify it. GPT3 what I have found is that you can usually recognize AI written content because it uses similar types of phrasing.
Now that’s it’s default, and if you really spend time crafting your request, you can end up tweaking it to sound a very specific way that doesn’t sound like AI. And that’s really important. What ends up happening is the default settings are probably something that a person could identify.
If a person can identify it, Google or, a machine learning is going to be able to identify it. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t just copy and paste. I’ve always found that AI content is a great starting point, but it can never replace a journalist, someone who has to do investigative reporting.
There’s never going to be an AI that can complete replace something like a newspaper, because it’s never been trained on, doesn’t have the information, and can’t pull it in without you providing it in some way.
Now, if you feed AI a bunch of content, ask it to summarize and put that content together into something cohesive, that’s where it can do a really great job.
Comparison to Low Cost Writing Websites
One of the things that I did recently is I looked at some content that I had requested about two years ago through an online writing website. I took the exact same prompt that I gave the content writer, and I put that into one of the GPT 3.5 tools.
The content that I got back was just as good, and passed all the same tests. So it was just as good as someone costing 10 cent, a word, which is definitely not a super expensive. This wasn’t a highly researched article or anything like that, no interviews. It was just some information about a topic because on the website, we wanted to make sure that the users were informed and understood what that service was. We didn’t need anything really original in thought, as it was more to help a user understand what the service was than anything else. That content was just as good.
I timed myself, it took about six minutes to create that content. Two years ago, I spent something like $15 – $20 on it for 250 words. This gave me about 550 words in comparison. My cost was pennies.
So what would make the most sense in this use case? The AI based content, likely couldn’t be identified as AI content, as I went through and copy edited it, cleaned it up, changed some of the phrasing to phrasing that I preferred. And that was probably the bulk of the four or five minutes of the six minutes was just doing those little tweaks to kind of customize it to how I would write.
The Key to Ensuring AI Content is Unique and Not Detectable
And that’s the big key here is that I made it my own. The content was adjusted, phrasing adjusted, and using a very unique prompt that has a very low likelihood of anyone else ever asking the same thing.
The last point that search engine journal had mentioned is they had a interview with Scott Aaronson who talks AI safety. And one of the things that he talked about from the open AI research is that there may be ways that they can watermark the content and they would do this by, things like how many punctuation marks are, where they are.
Number of words, in a sentence, things like that, where. it can be understood through machine learning that if it’s a sentence is structured in a certain way than it was generated by AI, that’s pretty much all they can do. The AI tools that Google is using to determine if they’re spam, they can likely look for certain words, certain errors and punctuation. I see that a lot where it uses dashes, where most people don’t write with dashes. there’s extra spaces after a comma, things like that. Those little telltales are something that a copywriter should be able to fix and probably adjust. And so when you’re talking about creating a long form piece of content, if you don’t have someone copy editing AI content, then it’s probably going to be something that can be found.
But realistically on watermarking, if someone does a good job with their copy editing and goes through the content, it’s probably not going to be possible.
So in the end, ChatGPT, I highly recommend taking a look at it. It’s a really cool tool. It’s a free for now interface into DaVinci 3.5 from open AI with a really solid conversation model, and I think that what you’ll find is that the content is really solid. In some cases it can save you a ton of time when you’re trying to just come up with some responses, get some ideas on maybe top things you want to talk about.
Give it a shot, write a blog post with it, ask it some questions. Use that to generate something, see how long it takes. See how creative you end up getting from just using the tool because in the end, that’s what it is. It’s a tool, and I think that it can be used really well.
My opinion is ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg that we’re going to see in AI content. When we see GPT 4, or when GPT 5 comes out in the next couple years, it’s going to be really hard for you to be able to distinguish that kind of content from someone who is writing regular piece of content again, without that kind of original research interviews.
I hope you guys all have a great holiday and we’ll see you next year.