Nowadays there’s one topic permeating through discourse in every industry from the arts to film and television to academia - Artificial Intelligence, or AI. Trained through consuming billions of words worth of content across the Internet, AI and AI programs are here to make a huge impact, for better or worse, in the way our content is created - especially when it comes to writing.

With the advent of AI writing models like ChatGPT being so easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection, generating written content through these programs seems like a cheap and easy cheat code to populate your sites with text. However, there are various risks and consequences to using AI-generated content in place of organic copy, and this blog post is here to detail these risks for you and why we recommend you rethink your approach to written content.

AI-generated content will actively damage your website’s SEO, and drastically weaken your website’s ability to be seen by a larger audience, thus losing you potential business.

This is because Google’s recent update which actively seeks to boost what it deems as ‘helpful content’ to ensure original and beneficial content written ‘by people, for people’ is boosted by its algorithm, and ‘unhelpful content’ is less likely to rank well. Because of AI’s reliance on regurgitating existing content for its ‘original’ writing, Google is able to identify when content has been reused and punish sites accordingly.

The punishments Google serves have been varied - from reducing your SEO score due to a mishandling of trust, to taking websites down for copyright infringement. What this means for your website - and in turn your business - is that a reliance on AI-generated content will see not only your site - and thus any potential income that your site would generate - but your reputation will be actively damaged, and you risk losing the trust of your clientele.

One crucial thing to always remember about using AI to generate content is that AI cannot create something truly original. AI can only create based on what already exists and make an attempt to replicate it - from relevant websites to news articles to social media posts to forum discussions. For a business in an area like the photo booth industry - where it’s crucial to be able to differentiate yourself from competitors - this can prove to be a major drawback.

Artificial intelligence cannot hold a candle to human experience. Creative and original content crafted through drawing from your own experiences in the industry, your unique insights to your potential clientele, and your own knowledge of your products - something AI lacks - will always prove to be more engaging, more shareable, and thus more beneficial to the visibility and viability of your website and your business.

As we’ve already stated in this blog, AI creates copy based on written content that already exists. This written content is what the AI was trained on, and as a result the AI is vulnerable to the possibility of generating biased and incorrect information if the content it was trained on has those same issues.

A human writer would be able to provide accurate and balanced information while also being able to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the industry - something AI may not be capable of doing if it hasn’t been trained with accurate information.

For photo booth businesses, the risk of misinforming clientele on your products, your services, or other aspects of your brand could lead to negative customer experiences, leading to a damaged reputation and a negative effect on your finances.

AI is not without its benefits. It’s easy to use, it’s accessible, and when used appropriately for things like getting inspiration, it’s an incredibly helpful tool for writers. But this is where its usefulness ends. Though it may be tempting to utilize AI to generate content for your website, the amount of drawbacks and the potential damage it could have on your brand is too glaring to ignore.

We understand that sometimes writing copy may be intimidating - especially for those who aren’t confident about their writing abilities. Tools like ChatGPT may seem like the easiest solution for this pain point, but there are also a variety of available services - including BoothWebsite - that provide writing services so that you don’t have to worry about doing it yourself but also avoid the risks and pitfalls of AI-generated content.

One of the most important jobs that your website has is to provide visibility for your brand and act as a digital storefront to attract potential clientele. With Google’s recent updates re-emphasizing their dedication to boosting rich, uniquely written and developed content over what they deem as ‘unhelpful’ repeated content - of which AI is prone to creating - it seems clear that the path forward for every business owner is to trust that your own creativity and lived experiences are a bigger benefit to your business than using AI.