9 risks of AI-generated content

AI brings with it a lot of benefits, from increasing efficiency for individual workers to reducing costs for businesses. According to Adobe, AI is expected to increase labour productivity in the average business by up to 40 percent, enabling people to make much more efficient use of their time.

But with these benefits also comes dangers and risks associated with relying on AI-generated content. Here we explore some of these potential problems.

1. Inaccuracy issues

While it’s far too simplistic to write AI-generated content off completely by saying it’s inaccurate, some caution should be taken around this.

AI is smart, but it still needs to be updated regularly, which means sometimes it can only share old content in answer to certain questions it is asked.

ChatGPT, for example, can access the internet to retrieve information in some cases, but not always. And OpenAI last made updates to ChatGPT in March of 2023, which means some of its information is old and already out of date.

If you totally rely on AI to create your website or marketing copy (or both) without checking it, there’s a risk that content is now incorrect or out of date.

2. Made up content

Building on the accuracy point, AI content can sometimes be peppered with falsehoods. AI tools can be imperfect and end up doing things like making up quotes and attributing them to real people.

There are obvious risks attached to this, especially with the example above which could impact the reputation of the company sharing this false quote and the person who has had the quote attributed to them.

3. AI content could sound boring and repetitive

Humans can bring individuality, creativity and flair to their work. We have the ability to come up with original ideas, be experimental and try out different ideas before settling on the best one.

AI content tools don’t possess these abilities, meaning there’s a danger the content they produce could sound boring, repetitive and plain.

Websites need to be engaging, drawing audiences in, and marketing content needs to grab people’s attention. This can be hard to achieve if you rely solely on an AI generator.

4. It also sometimes sounds unnatural

Even worse than sounding boring, AI content does hold a risk of sounding quite unnatural and robotic. At the least this doesn’t make for a very enjoyable reading experience and at the worst it can mean people struggle to relate to your business and even find it distrustful.

This is particularly problematic if you’re creating content about sensitive or emotional topics. AI doesn’t understand empathy, which means the content could sound cold, unemotional and just completely the wrong tone for the topic or topics, which in turn could disengage or even upset the audience.

5. Plagiarism and legal issues

As AI-content generation is still a relatively new concept, there may also be legal risks associated with relying on it, including plagiarism issues.

AI content tools are often marketed as 100 percent plagiarism-free, and yet the Guardian reported how in 2016-2017 there were 2,278 cases of plagarised content from AI.

While this is still pretty low in the grand scheme of things, and AI tools will have become more advanced in the years since then, plagarism is still a risk and the legal consequences can be severe if it happens.

6. Lack of optimisation

AI-generated content is not automatically optimised for search engines and target audiences, which is problematic given how important search engine optimisation is, especially for website content.

Equally, AI content won’t automatically have links, meta tags or relevant keywords applied, all of which also help to make content more search engine optimised.

One option could be to generate content for your website or marketing materials and then optimise it afterwards. But using AI to generate content and then failing to optimise it for search could have serious negative consequences for businesses.

7. Biased content

Biased content is also a risk if you rely on an AI tool to create your website or marketing copy.

If you are wanting to create content based on data and statistics, for example, and that data is biased, then the content will be too.

Amazon, for instance, recently had to get rid of its recruiting tool because it discovered the algorithm was biased against women. While this isn’t a content example as such, it still illustrates the point. You won’t necessarily know where AI tools are pulling their information from, meaning you won’t know how reliable the data source or sources are.

8. It’s a risk to your brand voice

Building a brand is a key part of any business and its marketing strategy, and your brand’s voice is a vital element of this.

Relying on AI to write your website and marketing content, without checking and modifying it, can have a negative impact on your brand voice as it’s unlikely the AI tool would be able to match the tone properly.

9. Google penalisation

Google has promised that it will always reward high quality content, however it’s produced. So simply using an AI content tool to create content will not necessarily mean Google will penalise it – and in fact it may reward it.

This said, Google explains that it ranks content depending on whether it demonstrates qualities of EEAT – expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Due to some of the reasons explored in this article, it might be less likely that AI content – left unchecked – demonstrates all of these.

What can be done?

When it comes to AI-generated content, it’s all about weighing up the risks against the positives, and putting sensible checks in place.

AI content is, for example, always improving and it’s becoming harder and harder to detect. Therefore, you might decide to use it in some aspects of your website content and marketing content generation, while leaving it out of others. You could also decide to use AI tools as part of your content generation process but ensure that it is always checked for accuracy, optimised and edited if it doesn’t sound as engaging as it should.