Introduction
Is AI content creation the future of branding, or a shortcut to mediocrity?
With companies racing to harness AI for articles, social media posts, and visuals, it’s a crucial moment for brand identity and content quality.
In today’s episode, we chat with May Swell, founder of Montenas—a top-tier content production agency. Broadcasting from a breezy, rainy spot, May dives into the wild world of AI in content creation.
We tackle the clash between Google’s algorithms and AI-generated text for ranking.
Can DALL-E and Mid Journey truly bring artistic value, or are they just fancy tools?
Are Google’s priorities biased against AI-written content?
And when it comes to brand integrity, does AI boost or undermine quality?
May challenges the status quo and urges marketers to rethink content purpose, value, and authenticity.
Tune in for a lively discussion that’ll make you reconsider everything you thought you knew!
Does it really matter if your content is human-made or AI-engineered? Your insights could reshape the future of content creation. Dive into the conversation with us!
What You’ll Learn
– The impact of AI-generated content on Google rankings.
– How AI content affects brand perception and quality.
– Importance of prompt engineering for AI success.
– Balancing AI automation and content value.
– Ensuring organizational knowledge behind AI content.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Hello and welcome to the content universe. Today. I want to talk about whether it is good or bad to use a art for content creation. Now. Right now. I’m actually standing outside, so if there’s a little bit of wind in the microphone, or if you can hear some droplets, it’s actually just because it’s been quite windy and quite rainy. But I’ve really tried finding a spot where I can stand without too much noise. Anyway. I may swell and I am the founder of Montana’s which is a content production agency where we do podcasts. We do social media posts, blog posts etc. For for our clients. Now, like I said, I want to talk about whether it’s a good or a bad idea to use a I for creating your content and just give you some other my thoughts on. Why? Well, I don’t think it’s a bad idea and and why that is now I came up with this topic, basically because today I’ve been working quite a lot on getting the images for the blog posts on my website or on montana.co to get the images better because right now the images are created by Dhali, which is the chat gpt version of an image generation. Generation, whereas if you really want to create high quality AI generated images, you probably want to go to mid journey instead, however, mid journey doesn’t at the moment, offer an API solution, so it’s kind of a nuisance going through mid journey anyway. During all this work, I came to think about whether it was actually bad for the content quality or or for you know, even the ranking and it is it a bad idea, that I’m using so much AI to produce all these articles on my webpage and that includes of course, both the images and also the text. Well, I’ve given this a couple of couple of thoughts. So what you be nervous what you’re probably be nervous about. Is does it work? I can’t talk right now, wait a minute? Okay, I’m here. One of the things that you might be thinking about is well does it hurt my rankings does it hurt my Google rankings another thing? You might be thinking about is whether it will hurt your brand. So would it be bad for your for like a quality brand that you are using AI to produce some of your content? That’s also of course a really big big thing to kind of take into account. When you want to choose whether to use an AI or not. I have a bit of counter questions to this because first of all if we talk about branding and no not branding, but if we talk about ranking I want to turn the question around and I want to look at what would be the what will be Google’s mission. And now we’re talking like the old Google. So to say because Google is also reinventing themselves right now, it’s not because well because of the competition of of AI and and and AI driven searches. But but as of now Google is still the king of search and what are their mission? Well Google’s mission is not to avoid not to avoid AI stuff Google’s mission is not to you know prioritize human human written articles. It doesn’t say anything about that. It would be kind of odd to say because Google’s mission is to provide the searcher with the right answer with a thorough right answer in the first go right. That’s the purpose of Google and of course then making a bit of money in the meantime, but but that is like the core purpose of Google is to just answer the freaking question answer the search give the right answer to search and therefore I really don’t believe that there’s any difference whether it’s been written by a human being or it’s been written by an AI because if the AI provides a better answer a clearer answer and more thorough a deeper answer. Well, why would Google want to underprioritize that just to serve the next best thing that wouldn’t make sense to me? So really, I don’t believe that a I generated articles are hurting your ranking. Now, I may be wrong and I’m not an SEO expert at all. So if you are. leave a comment here and tell me I’m wrong. And and then you know, we can have a discussion about it because I’m really open to this. I’m just I’m just kind of looking at what would be Google’s mission in life and and to me, it was seem well weird if they were, you know prioritizing AI under human or opposite prioritizing human written stuff over AI stuff. Because it doesn’t, it doesn’t really have an influence on the core purpose of the search. Now, so that’s on the ranking side. If we look at the branding side, I think there’s another question that or there’s another thing that comes to mind and that is the fact that, well, it will hurt your brand if it’s clear that it’s an AI written piece. Not because it’s clear that is AI but because it is clear that AI is mostly because it’s really badly written, right? Or it or if it’s an image, it’s because it’s a really bad image. Like it’s just not a nice image? It’s not well-made. So that is a problem. That’s also what made me pondered today because I was looking at the images and I’m sorry Dali, but it’s your, your images are crap compared to to Mid Journey. And and I’m using Dali because of API possibilities. Right? Which is of course, well, kind of a bad excuse, but it it helps me automate my processes. So it’s also an enabler. And and the thing is because the images are so bad on my blog right now. I think the blog itself like the whole thing including the text it loses credibility because it looks like something that was just generated with AI and has no thought to it which is well partly true, but it’s also partly not true because the input to the AI and and the content of the blog post comes from well episodes like the one you’re listening to right now. So it’s not like just out of the blue creation. AI it is actually something that is based off of my own experiences and the ways that we work in Montenas. So I think yes, it hurts your brand if it’s bad but not because it’s AI bad, but just because it’s bad bad. Does that make sense? I think what you should really consider if you want to if you want to look at if you want to create a solution that or if you want to use AI for doing all this you really need to be you need to work your prompted and I really dislike the word a problem to engineering, but there is a little bit of engineering to it. Not as in you need to take a University degree, but you really need to you know, try out different things experiment quite a lot with different variations of a prompt to get a good output and then of course you need to choose a good a good AI solution and I have gone through this in another episode the solutions that we do actually two episodes. And I really think that if you do that well, it all comes down to does the content provide value? Does the image provide value? Does does the text provide value if it’s a blog post if it’s a social media post, does it provide any value if it does well check mark on that one. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s an AI thing because if it creates the value or if it brings value to the reader well who cares where this AI and then I think the second parameter which is really important. And this is where the prompt engineering bit really comes into play is is it worth reading is it worth consuming this piece of content and in that is in worth consuming I include both is it easy to read is it a pleasant reading experience. Is it funny is it engaging is it a nice piece of text Is it a nice image is it Worth consuming do you entertain your readers all of these kinds of things that good copywriters are really really good at but it’s also things that most you know, if you just do like a really blunt prompt into your into your AI service chat jbt or whoever if you just do really quick. It’s just not a worth it’s not a read. That’s worthwhile spending your time on because it’s just poorly written try it out go there try it out right now and you’ll see that if you just like if you do like read a blog post on this and that blababla you will see that most for instance most sentences they will be like 11 to maybe 13 words long which just gets really monotonous when you’re reading it. It’s a terrible read terrible. Whereas if you do like if you include in your prompter use a vivid tone of voice use conversational style a very the sentence length. You know a lot from one word sentences to you know 30 words sentences all this kind of stuff play around with it because not all of it works but if you work on that you actually get something that is really worth reading and the same of course goes with with creating images the same goes with I’m guessing like any of the of the content producing AI stuff that you can you can come across out there okay so summing up I don’t think it hurts your branding but that’s that’s not ones on me. It’s just if I were Google. I would not let it hurt rankings because it doesn’t make sense for Google for the business model of Google. It doesn’t make sense. Does it hurt your brand well not anymore than if you were using a bad freelancer, so it’s all about getting the content well. It’s not about whether it’s an AI who’ve written it you know it’s not a piece of art that you were creating. It is an article or post or whatever it’s a you know infographic. It’s something that’s designed. It’s design. It’s designed to help people achieve something whatever it is. It’s not it’s not art. It’s it’s just well just design sorry for all my design friends out there. You do amazing job, but it but there’s a difference between art and design and art can be purposeless where’s design and they’re also under this also comes content production. It can all be you know it’s it all needs to have a purpose. Otherwise it doesn’t really make any sense. And then I think just to just for the last little bit of little piece of advice here. I think it’s very important when you use AI to create content. That the content that you create and the knowledge that you bring forth. I think it’s extremely important that that knowledge also exists within your organization. So it’s very, very easy to go to you know do an SEO analysis and then get a bunch of keywords and phrases and all this that you need to answer. You know write a bunch of articles from those questions that people have. And then post it on your web page. But if the answer that you give in the blog post and in the social media post and all this. If the stuff that you provide there doesn’t really resonate or if the knowledge doesn’t exist inside your organization. What are you gonna do when the client or the potential client, the lead calls you? What are you gonna do? you’re just gonna say yeah well mm well if the block process that it must be right you need to have the knowledge inside of your organization as well. And one of the really nice and neat ways to ensure this is, well, of course to base all of your stuff on on interviews, base it all on a podcast like I’m doing right now. Base everything on something that is you know. That that is already existing inside of your organization. Alright, I think, I think that’s gonna be it for today’s episode. I’m gonna head out in the rain again and and I hope you enjoyed and and let me know because this is a controversial topic, I know. So let me know if you agree or don’t agree. I know you can leave comments in Spotify and I really love to hear from you. Do you agree on this? Does it do it matter whether it’s an AI or human being who created the piece of content whatever kind of content is? Does it matter or doesn’t it matter? What matters to you and would you be able to tell the difference and is it important to be able to tell the difference. All of these kinds of questions I’d really love to hear from you. what’s your take? I know that you all are super knowledgeable in this field as well and you all have a great opinion so just hit me up on that one. And if you don’t like hitting me up in an open comment section because it’s a controversy or controversial topic. Well hit me up on the email podcast at montenos.co that email leads directly into my own personal Inbox. So yeah, let’s have a let’s have a chat. I really look forward to hearing from you and yes see you again in the content universe.