There’s a new buzzword/acronym floating around the writing space at the moment, and it’s the “AIO writer” - the Artificial Intelligence Optimisation writer.
Some sites are saying that the advent of the AIO marks the death of the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) writer - and at this stage, there is merit to the argument.
What is AIO writing, and will it really kill the SEO writer?
What is AIO Writing?
AIO writing is a bit of a misnomer. AIO writing is more like AI editing - taking the output from an AI text generator and editing it up to make it seem as if a human wrote the piece itself.
The business model is to have an AI write a blog or webpage in mere minutes, have a human AIO specialist massage the content so it bypasses any potential AI-detection algorithm (the kind that can scuttle your hard won SEO) and appears as if a human wrote the entire thing itself.
HOW AIO WORKS, IN THEORY
If you are an SEO content writer, the usual process is to write an article that caters to a certain search term, keyword, or keyphrase.
The aim of this is to provide expert-level, authoritative and trustworthy content so it ranks higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a user query. The higher the ranking, the more likely it will be clicked on, resulting in more traffic for the site. For business or commercial sites, this forms a crucial part of their digital marketing.
Instead of an SEO writer writing the content from scratch, the initial ‘draft’ would be generated by an AI algorithm. This can take minutes instead of the hours in which a human would usually complete a draft.
As discussed in a previous blog, “ripping and posting” AI content can potentially harm your SEO efforts. An AIO writer (or editor) would “massage” the AI content so it has the superficial appearance of “experience” - the Google PageRank metric that AI struggles to replicate in its writing.
The AIO writer could also edit the work so it has a consistent tone of voice, is free of glaring copy errors, and/or factual inaccuracies.
However, it could be argued, that any veteran SEO writer would not need to edit their own work to a significant degree. In the three hours an AIO writer shapes a 2,500 word AI-generated article so it’s worthy of PageRank and human eyes, a deft writer could have written the article itself with the editing process resembling proofreading (fixing grammatical or spelling mistakes) instead of substantive copyediting (making stylistic or editorial changes to the piece, e.g., removing entire sections.)
A human writer could also have made critical decisions when it comes to linking to other authoritative sources, instead of shoehorning them in after the fact.
The POTENTIAL Limitations of AIO
It would seem that my job is caught up in a “rapidly developing, uncontrollable technological system” as the thinker Jacques Ellul would say.
However, the fact I just (rather shamelessly) name-dropped an obscure technological thinker from the late 20th Century also shows the limitation of AIO writers. If they are mere editors, over a long-enough timeline, all AIO writing will sound, feel, and read the same.
AIO writing as a bonafide “profession” may also be a flash in the pan. Google and other closed-source detection algorithms may become so sophisticated they will ferret out AIO content from the “real thing” and end up penalising “cheaters” who take the easy way out.
Ellul said “every problem generates a technological solution; computers breed ever larger, more fragile, and vulnerable systems. But the solutions raise more and greater problems than they solve.” His disciple, the incomparable media ecologist Neil Postman went further: “like all important technologies of the past, they are Faustian bargains, giving and taking away, sometimes in equal measure, sometimes more in one way than the other.”
Like the smartphone revolution in 2007, it “solved” many problems by combining many different technologies into one device. It also had unintended consequences. Mental health problems, addiction, and cyberbullying are now rampant problems caused (at least to a significant degree) by smartphones and “always-on” social media.
The academic Evegeny Morozov in his landmark To Save Everything, Click Here, argues that technology can often be an improvement, and is not necessarily revolutionary in and of itself. Even the once “revolutionary” streaming service Netflix has lost more than one million subscribers.
There is a tendency to view any mass-adopted technology as truly game-changing. I even wrote in a journal article (2011) that businesses don’t use computers because they’re handy; you literally cannot run a business without one and a connection to the World Wide Web. Is AIO in the same category? Would this level of introspection even be possible for AI? Or is that not what we want?
I mean, you can travel by horseback these days, but why would you?
That said, I still wear mechanical watches when many of my friends wear Apple Watches. What does that make me?
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