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If you’re not up on the latest freelancing news, you haven’t been paying attention. Within 7 days, the entire industry has been upended and disheveled due to AI knee jerk reactions by clients and content platforms. 

What Could Be Revolutionary in Content Writing and SEO Is Now a Pariah

If you’ve spent any time looking for high-quality articles to research topics in the last two to five years, you know that Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo et al just keep getting worse. They promote low-quality content at the top of their search engine results and bury well-researched informative content that could actually provide you with knowledge. It gets even worse when you start looking for statistics. Need a stat on HR or another technical industry. Forget it. It’s behind a paywall. Are you researching a new medical procedure to help out your end client and need real facts and research studies on it? Forget it. It’s behind a paywall.

Enter AI

AI is a game changer when it comes to researching topics and getting information you can actually use to create in-depth high quality content that is human-readable. It also saves time on research because the AI just summarized those 10 good-quality web pages you were going to spend three hours looking for in order to properly research and craft your content. All you have to do is fact-check it and put it in your writing-experienced words. 

Content Platforms Jump the Gun. Clients Freak Out: Industry Tanked.

If you haven’t seen the disclaimers and warnings on many of the content platforms these days, you’ve missed a whole industry shift. Many of these sites now require their writers to check a box that states - They did not use AI in any capacity nor did they copy any content or summarize any content from any existing page.

Uh oh….

No AI. No Copying or summarizing anything.

If you’ve ever researched anything, even at the academic level, you know that existing content and research on topics are reviewed first. In fact, sometimes this research is used to do a study on what’s already been studied in order to get a baseline. But, now, because of AI panic, writers are now not allowed to research, summarize or use anything existing. Huh?

So just how are content writers supposed to craft those articles? Under those rules, there can be nothing else written unless the writer already knows about it and can pull from their wealth of information. But then, how old is that information? Did you want the latest trends? Technological advancements? Well, if you did, your writer can’t go get it because that would constitute rewriting something that already exists on the Internet. Whoops.

Is the Industry Really Tanking?

You betcha.

Writers at WordAgents recently revolted, according to a post on Reddit. WordAgents actually did the exact opposite of most platforms. They embraced AI wholeheartedly. And wholly wrongly. Now, their base rate prior to implementing AI technology was 3 cents per word, according to the post and some comments. That’s already dangerously low for good-quality content.

Once they introduced the AI, their account managers ran all the articles through AI. Then, they pushed them through to the platform for writers to edit at 1 cent per word. The writers revolted, and understandably so. AI + human should be posting at a much higher rate than either one of those alone.

Another platform, Writers Access, decided to implement its own AI checker. If you know anything about AI checkers, you know that they are highly unreliable. They will say that content is clean that isn’t, and they will say that content has been partially or fully written by AI that hasn’t been put through AI, and the writer may not have even sampled any AI platforms to even begin to understand how they work.

Of course, Writer’s Access didn’t just implement this faulty AI checker, they accused writers of using AI without any basis, according to a post on Reddit. they also threatened to remove writers from the platform suspected AI as indicated by their haphazardly put-together checker and to send content back for AI-suspected revisions, which we all know there's no baseline for trying to edit content that's been flagged for AI. There's not even any protocol for defending yourself against such accusations. To make matters worse, WA no longer in-houses its own content for its blogs and marketing materials. Could it be due to the AI checker they just installed or the fact that they can’t even afford to pay their writers their worst rates on the platform? Makes you think, doesn’t it?

How Should AI Be Used?

AI should be used in a hybrid approach. When used correctly, it can increase your informational content, speed up the writing process, improve SEO and provide better end results. This means that if you want the best SEO content for your business, you should use writers that use AI but also know how to fact-check and clean up any content they may have used from the AI system.

 But but but but but.... Google downgrades AI content!  No, it doesn't. Who told you that? They advertise Bard on their front-end search page in order to encourage people to give it a try.