AI, or artificial intelligence, has been one of the most popular topics in the past couple of years. You have probably heard about it even if you do not follow the news closely. Some of the leading tech companies have integrated AI in their products, and new players developing AI software have emerged on the tech market. As it seems, AI will change the way we live and work. What exactly is AI, though? Is it something that can help you to build or improve your website? We will try to answer these questions in this article.

• What is AI?
• Pros and cons of AI-generated content
• Pros
• Cons
• AI tools you can use
• Text
• Audio
• Images
• Video
• So, do you need AI for your website content?

What is AI?

In essence, AI is advanced software that learns from patterns, and then plans and performs tasks on a human intelligence level. This is usually done by feeding the software with large amounts of training data and analyzing it for correlations. Artificial intelligence refers to simulating human intelligence, while predicting outcomes is known as machine learning. Many people often use the term AI for any software that uses data to predict a certain outcome, even though machine learning is a more accurate term in this case.

When it comes to hosting, AI has many applications. Such software can be used to design a website (build the entire site or choose specific elements such as colors or fonts), to choose a domain name, to generate blog posts, to generate images and/or videos, and more. The process is usually as easy as supplying some keywords or describing in free text what exactly you need. The software will then create or suggest the content/website you need.

Domain generators and website builders that use predictive modelling to suggest certain site templates have existed for years, but they weren’t called AI. For many people, these are the same tools with a different name. The backend of AI tools is quite different, though. One of the most important differences between these tools and the software we have been using for years is the ability to create different types of content within seconds. This is why we will focus on content in our article – the pros and cons of using it, and the tools you can use to generate it.

Pros and cons of AI-generated content

In simple terms, AI-generated content is any content that is created by an AI system using a machine learning algorithm. This doesn’t have to be just text. AI content includes images, audio, and video as well. Any content on your site can be AI-generated – titles, blog posts, product descriptions, photos, paintings, promotional or informative videos, etc.

Pros

• Increase efficiency and productivity. Using AI tools, you can produce content automatically and rapidly, increasing your productivity significantly. You won’t have to do any research or do anything else in advance. You won’t have to proofread your articles either, as there won’t be any typos. Any content you create using AI tools will be well-structured and engaging. One big advantage of using AI for your website is that you can always have fresh content.
• Boost content scalability. AI tools allow you to add lots and lots of articles on any topic. Whether they will be blog posts, regular site content, emails or image galleries, you can expand your content with ease. You should not worry if you will be able to add more new content as the tool you use will help you with that. If you want to expand your existing content, such as extending your existing blog posts, all it takes is a simple request in the AI tool you use. Additional useful information will be added to your articles in no time. If you need images, you can quickly generate whole galleries and add as many new images as you want to your website.

• Save time and money. Without a doubt, using AI can save you a lot of time. You can generate an article in less than a minute, which is far less than you would need to write the same article manually. If you use a paid AI tool, the investment will pay off, especially if you usually pay other people to create content for you. This is valid especially for visual content – image editing and video creation are expensive services. You can use the time and money you save to do other essential tasks.
• Create more focused content. By supplying the correct input information to the AI tool you use, you can get content that is specifically targeted at your audience. You can select the type of sources that will be used, for example, so the content will include specific information that you may want your audience to see. This way, all your texts will be informative, and your visitors will see you as an authority on a given topic. If you want to create visual content, some tools allow you to supply sample content, so the images and videos they create will be generated based on your specific requirements.

• Keep style and tone consistent. A problem you may encounter when you create content for your website is that articles and blog posts may sound different, each one with its own tone and style. This may happen if you don’t write the entire post all at once. Sometimes you may just be in the mood, or you may simply have a good idea to write about. If more people create content, the style of their posts will be even more different. Unless this is something you want to do on purpose, AI tools will solve that problem. The entire content on your website, and any blog posts you add, will have the same style and tone for a more consistent user experience.

Cons

• Quality may not be high. If you generate text using AI, it will not have typos and it will most likely be written using the tone you have specified in the instructions. It is possible, however, that some of the content may not be very good – it may sound monotonous, or you may notice some repetitiveness. The reason is that AI tools rely on existing data, so the content they generate may lack creativity. Without the human touch, AI tools can help creators to produce content, but cannot replace them.

• Other websites may have similar content. If other people use the same AI tools that you use, it is likely that they will have similar content. Even if the wording and the tone are different, an AI tool will use the same database when it generates content for different tasks. The theme of an image, or the setting in a short story, for instance, may be similar or even the same as those on another website. There is a chance that search engines may consider such content duplicate, which may lead to your website getting penalized. While this isn't something very likely to happen, it is not impossible.

• Potential SEO issues. You will come across different opinions on the effect of AI-generated content on search engine optimization. Google, for example, accepts AI-generated content, but only if it is helpful, high-quality content that delivers reliable information (last update: February 2023). Spammy AI-generated content is not allowed. Only a year earlier, however, in April 2022, Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller stated that AI-generated content is not permitted in general and may lead to penalties. Either way, poorly written content may affect your SEO negatively, and with AI, you cannot be certain that everything a tool generates will be top quality.

For us these would, essentially, still fall into the category of automatically generated content which is something we’ve had in the Webmaster Guidelines since almost the beginning.

And people have been automatically generating content in lots of different ways. And for us, if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do. Those kind of things.

My suspicion is maybe the quality of content is a little bit better than the really old school tools, but for us it’s still automatically generated content, and that means for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.

Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller, 2022

• Inaccuracies. You may have come across AI-generated images of people with six fingers. This is one of the popular examples of inaccuracies you can see in AI-generated content. Information may be old as it is often not collected in real time; AI bots often provide ambiguous answers to questions or even contradict their previous replies; “facts” may turn out to be made up. All such inaccuracies may affect the reputation of your website as people will simply not trust it if they come across inaccurate content of any sort.

• Limited customization. Depending on your input, AI tools can generate custom content for your needs. As they cannot fully replace a person, however, they cannot produce content with that personal touch only a person can add. You know your audience, so any content you create manually will be targeted at these specific people, and not at a general group that shares similar interests as your actual audience.

AI tools you can use

We have listed a few tools that you can use if you want to generate some or all your website content using artificial intelligence. Most of them have a free tier that gives you access to some features, but if you want to unlock all features, you will have to use a paid plan.

We are not affiliated with any of the tools below, and we cannot say if you will find any of them easy to use or not.

Text

• ChatGPT – chat, general information, blog posts

• Bard AI – chat, research, blog posts

• Copy.ai - emails, blog posts, social media

• Grammarly – spelling and grammar check

• Sudowrite – generative fiction

• Anyword – marketing tool for different platforms

• Cohesive – blog posts, social media content, scripts

Audio

• WellSaid Labs – text-to-speech, video voiceover

• Murf – text-to-speech, voice cloning, video voiceover

• Lovo.ai - text-to-speech, 500+ voices in 100 languages, online video editor

• Speechify – text-to-speech, video transcription, AI dubbing

Images

• Bing Image Creator

• Adobe Firefly

• DALL-E 2

• Craiyon

• DreamStudio

• Cohesive

Video

• Kapwing – video generator, article-to-video

• Synthesia – video creation, video scripts, lots of templates

• Invideo – online video editor, premium content

• Veed.io - feature-rich video editor

• OpusClip – repurpose long videos into short ones for social media

You will find many more tools online, so you have to check which one will work for you.

So, do you need AI for your website content?

Artificial intelligence has evolved a lot in the past couple of years. AI content generation is not an exception – there are lots of tools that allow you to create text, audio content or images with ease. There is no doubt that such tools will have a significant impact on the website industry in the coming years. Nonetheless, many people still prefer to use conventional tools.

You can build a website with ease using such tools. If you use WordPress, for example, you can use lots of free themes and plugins, some of which include demo content that you can replace. The application has a lot of built-in functions as well. There are also website builders that suggest themes or various forms without using AI and include lots of useful modules. When it comes to building a website, you can usually do it within a matter of hours, even faster. The most difficult part is to create quality content regularly for that website.

Without a doubt, AI tools can save you a lot of time and allow you to create diverse, error-free texts. When it comes to images and video, they can also save you a lot of money - image creation and video editing are usually expensive, time-consuming services. As AI lacks the personal touch you can add, though, it may be better to review and if necessary, to append the content that AI tools create for you before you publish it. A balanced approach will allow you to take advantage of all the perks of AI-generated content, while adding a much-appreciated human touch.

In fact, this is what we recommend – you can combine AI-generated and manually created content for the best results in terms of quality, scalability and SEO. There are already plugins for WordPress, for example, which allow you to easily integrate various AI services into your website and generate content automatically. You should not avoid AI-generated content due to some prejudices or simply because you are used to creating everything manually. New inventions make life easier, so you should use the best of both AI and conventional tools for your content.