Last year, AI came in with force and many marketing agencies opted to trust AI content over human quality. One year later, marketers have learnt that bad AI content does not bring good results.            

Ivana Flynn, iGaming Daily’s resident SEO expert, was joined by Emma Byrne, Head of Publishing at Gentoo Media, and Samira van Diepen, Founder of Content Lab, to discuss the rise and fall of AI-generated content.

On the rising use of AI, Samira said: “A lot of clients raised concerns about AI and the use of AI. Within our company, we have become very aware of writers using AI and we’ve tried to figure out tools to avoid delivering AI content.

“I do know a lot of gaming companies, and other companies, have been trying to use AI for their content but we try to stay away from it.”

Emma added that there was an initial panic from a media production perspective around the possibility of AI taking marketers’ jobs which was then replaced by “curiosity” about the possibilities that AI offered for improving content.

The proliferation of AI content was thwarted in March when Google released an update targeting AI-generated spam and prioritising high-quality, human-generated content.

Samira explained that, after the update, “everyone is focusing on quality and everyone that had tried to do something with AI has gone back from it”.

Additionally, her company Content Lab now works to ensure that the content they produce is not generated by AI.

She said: “Where it starts with us is with the onboarding procedure when new writers start. They are made aware of the fact that we do not accept AI content.

“We do scan and we do check and our editors are very well trained in spotting AI content. I have not found one tool that is scanning flawlessly, so we use different tools and we do aim to always have a clean AI scan, but that’s not always easy.”

Emma also noted that even if AI content is used, a human editor is needed for quality control purposes. 

“Even those that are actively using AI content are still having a human editor at the very end of that process for quality checking and assuring,” explained Emma. 

“Sometimes you do get a lot of very generic content, or equally, I’ve seen content where it’s like a thesaurus wrote it, as in they’re taking every complicated English word and just throwing it into a sentence and it doesn’t read very naturally.

“I think it’s interesting that as far as AI content has come, there is still a human at the very end either checking because they think it is AI content, or equally they’re checking it because it is AI content.”