Will SEO eventually be taken over by AI?

0
Sep 23, 2022 / by
Will SEO eventually be taken over by AI?

For many copywriters, the threat of AI appears to be hanging over our heads like the proverbial sword of Damocles. For artists, the first strike has already landed with a string of AI art generators now flooding Google and social media offering up surprisingly convincing results. Thankfully, however, I have yet to read a paragraph written by a machine that wasn’t obviously inhuman.

But that’s not to say this will always be the case.

The past

In recent years, there has been a lot written about the potential of AI to steal our jobs but, until now, it’s only really ever existed to make our jobs and our lives easier. For example, automation can be used to send our invoices (and invoice reminders), correct our spelling and grammar and even suggest potential alternative sentences. But it doesn’t write for us, at least not very well.

The present

Currently, there exists a brace of AI copywriting services but none of them is even close to being able to produce original and creative content on par with an experienced or even junior human copywriter. When it comes to boilerplate factual content, meanwhile, there is evidence that it can work. Alibaba, for example, has used the technology for its product descriptions and Associated Press has experimented with using it to announce game scores.

For many brands looking to create SEO content, they are still relying on the Google algorithm to call the shots and the algorithm has been tweaked in recent years to recognise quality and relevance over quantity. Ironically, the AI copywriting services available today would have been ideal in the early days of SEO; everything was a keyword-stuffed nightmare. But today, hiring a professional copywriting service is still comfortably your best bet for truly relevant and authoritative content.

The future

As far as the future is concerned, things look a little more worrying for us original content creators. Right now, there are around a dozen AI writing services, neither of which can offer much more than passable results. Of course, for some businesses that might not have the funds to hire original content creators, passable might be enough, particularly when they are charging less than £20 a month.

For many, the kind of content generated will be perfectly adequate but what it lacks is, rather understandably, personality. It’s when AI writing is able to cross the personality Rubicon that copywriters should start to worry but, thankfully, we are not quite there yet.

Ultimately, AI copywriting is still very much in its infancy but even in the worst-case scenario that it does end up replacing ‘some’ copywriters, it’s unlikely it will replace ‘all’ copywriters. If you can weave a sentence together that has some bite to it, then you’re probably safe for the foreseeable future.

We have a definitive emotional advantage over machines and it’s always going to be the emotion that turns readers into leads. But with the advances in natural language generation that we’re seeing now, this is a subject we might have to revisit in 10 years or so.