Last week, we had a guest in class, Connor Grieb, who is the founder of SEO Vineyard. His company is a Pittsburgh-based SEO business that helps customers “with all your digital marketing needs!” As he was walking us through SEO Vineyard, how it works, and how they advertise, he brought up their blog and mentioned that he uses ChatGPT for it.
We all know what ChatGPT is. It’s the latest in AI technology and has been found to generate a wide variety of smart text responses to user input. If you type in, “Make a lesson plan on economics,” it will do just that. And if you say, “Create code for an HTML restaurant website,” you will get said code. ChatGPT has its limits, but it is massively useful to any user and can give more curated answers to search queries. It’s essentially a personal search engine for whatever you need. Since it’s so powerful, this can be used for innocent or malicious purposes.
During class, it was brought up that Connor has used ChatGPT to come up with blog post topics, which I think is completely fine. Generating topics for content is difficult and sometimes you just need a more creative mind (or in this case, a more creative AI). Then, he said that he used the program to actually generate the posts with sources to get content out quicker. I imagine the team would take the generated content and then edit it to be more original, but I was concerned when I heard that a known company was using AI-generated content that is passed off as their own. I don’t think it’s right to use AI-generated content, whether that’s artwork, music, or text content, and then edit it a little bit and claim it’s original. With the development of this new technology, the lines between what is original and what isn’t are more blurred and we’re already seeing this in the digital art space. It’s not yours if it came from an AI. If you’re using AI to create content, then there should be a note that says it was AI-assisted, so users know that it wasn’t fully original.
Overall, ChatGPT and other online programs like it are great tools for coming up with a starting point for any project, but if you’re going past the beginning stage, you might want to reevaluate the ethics behind it.
2 Responses
This is a very relevant post as the use of AI increases. Very informative as well. Great job, Katie!
I was also surprised when Connor Grieb openly mentioned his company’s use of ChatGPT to create content! I agree that generating blog post topics using AI is a good use for it, but it is definitely crossing a line to use fully-AI generated content on your blog. AI has certainly raised a lot of moral questions, especially with the advancement of ChatGPT.