Your SEO blogs and other website content must be unique to bring traffic to your site. When you use AI, they SEEM unique enough. Does that mean AI blogs, or any other AI-generated content, falls under the same copyright laws as other writing?
The short answer is “no.”
Essentially, there is no copyright protection for anything created by non-humans, even machines created by those same humans. So, your blogs, product descriptions, or website content developed with a generative AI model can’t be copyrighted.
Why That Matters
It may seem unimportant. It’s not like you’re off to the copyright office to protect your SEO blogs or product descriptions. Then again, when created by human hands, your SEO blogs are automatically protected.
What would the impact be on your organization if suddenly all your blogs were copied by a competitor and put on their website?
- If you use AI blogs, there is nothing you could do.
- If you use human-written blogs, you can take legal action.
Will Your Content Be Stolen?
It happens all the time. The more valuable your content, the more likely it will be stolen.
Content aggregators scrape and repurpose content to generate traffic and revenue for themselves without doing the writing, typically without attribution.
Content thieves target product descriptions from e-commerce and classified ad sites because copying your content is easier and cheaper than creating their own. They copy huge volumes of online content with scraper bots called web crawlers. This automated software frequently scans your site and copies the content they want.
What Can You Do to Protect Your Unique Content
To combat internet thieves, you’ve got to prepare. First, you need to know if your content has been stolen, know the laws, and decide when it’s worth pursuing. Then, you must know how to get the content removed and prevent it from being stolen again.
None of that is possible, though, if your content is AI-generated.
This HUBSPOT blog talks about what steps you can take to protect your content. Neil Patel offers pretty much the same advice.
Why Unique, Human-Written Content is Vital
Honestly, I think there’s a place for the cheap, quick creation of AI content. Well, probably. Mostly, it seems best to use AI tools (like Grammarly), with expert human oversight.
That said, I’ve recently had a client come back after several months for human-written content after trying to implement AI-generated content for SEO. Apparently, even posting up to 10X as much AI content as human content, their rankings dropped. I’m no expert on Google algorithms, but I think search engines recognize and seem to be penalizing AI-generated content. We’ll see as time goes on.
AI content, of course, lacks emotional influence. If your product or brand voice requires a consistent, non-robotic impact, stick to human-written content, or come back, if you left.
Contact me at melodyswright@live.com or on Freelancer for a quote on your current projects.