Ask anyone what they think of AI and you’re bound to get one of two answers:
1 – It’s exciting! Who knows what will be possible in the future with it.
2 – It’s the worst! AI is fake and will do more harm than good.
Artificial intelligence is a polarising topic indeed. It may be too early to know the full implications of it, but what we DO know is that it’s neither all-good nor all-bad. It has pros and cons like anything else.
What’s more, AI is changing and will continue to change the way online marketing looks and functions.
From where we stand in early 2024, here are a few major pros and cons to artificial intelligence and its impact on digital marketing:
PRO: It saves time and money
It takes ChatGPT and AI seconds to do what a human can accomplish in a full day’s work. Multiply that out by a full year of work and the savings of both time and money are undeniable.
Note that the quality at this early stage of AI is not always as good as the quality of a human doing the same work, so some additional time will inevitably be spent fixing content and correcting any mistakes made by AI. No double AI’s quality will only get better with time, though.
CON: It allows website owners to “cheat” Google
Seasoned content writers and bloggers who have spent many years writing articles and publishing content manually are now starting to be outranked on Google by others who are taking advantage of AI to write articles in a micro-fraction of the time.
At the moment, Google hasn’t quite grasped how to tell which articles are AI-generated (and often lower quality) vs. which articles are manually created; however, the algorithm is always being tweaked and no doubt will start to account for this more in the coming months and years.
PRO: It automates tasks
Tedious tasks like responding to emails and chat queries and writing social media captions can now be outsourced to ChatGPT and AI, freeing up time for humans to focus more on marketing strategy.
CON: It often comes off as fake, robot-written content
The fact is, we can all tell when something was written by a bot – it just lacks the nuance typically found in human-generated text. Our Mildura digital marketing team full expects this to change in the coming years, with AI-generated text sounding more and more human-like.
PRO: It makes more possible
With all the time saved on tedious tasks and content writing, imagine what else we can spend it on!
CON: It’ll inevitably lead to some people losing their jobs
Perhaps the biggest consequence of AI is the fact that a LOT of people will be losing their jobs once their job tasks are eventually taken over by AI bots.
While this is of course a terrible thing, it does open up more options for those people and will perhaps redirect their careers toward a more fulfilling and aligned job… which is ultimately a pro.