Content creation with AI: Everything you need to know in 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is already revolutionizing the way online content is produced and written. The numbers back it up, as shown by the recent statement from OpenAI, the AI research company that developed the powerful language model GPT-3: “More than 300 applications are now using GPT-3, and tens of thousands of developers around the world are building on our platform. We are currently generating an average of 4.5 billion words per day and we continue to ramp up production traffic.”

Developments like these have been shaking up the world of content producers and SEO for several years: is this the end of writers? How will Google react? What impact will this have on content quality and the production process?

On this topic, Semji has something to say! As one of the first applications to use the GPT-3 language model 😏, we tackled the subject at the latest edition of SEO Square. On that occasion, Bertrand Girin, co-founder of Semji, and Olivier Balais, CTO of our solution, shared their perspective on:

• the benefits and limitations of AI,
• its impact on SEO and content strategies,
• the tools available,
• how to use AI to create even higher-performing content.

Through this article, you’ll discover the key takeaways and what you can put in place starting today.

You can also watch the conference replay!

Content creation in the age of artificial intelligence

Natural language processing tools, better known as NLP (Natural Language Processing), have seen strong development in recent years. Able to understand and generate human language while accounting for the complexity of linguistics, these AIs are of interest to the biggest players: from the giant Google with its BERT algorithm, to the very recent Wu Dao developed by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in July 2021.

The latest one to generate a lot of buzz, in May 2020, is GPT-3 ( Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3). This artificial intelligence program, developed by OpenAI, is a genuine revolution in content production!

A pioneer in this field, Semji relies on this technology to generate, among other things, automated briefs. Before any production begins, our users now save considerable time creating precise and complete SEO briefs. If you’d like to know how the Semji brief can help you produce your future content, request a trial with one of our Customer Success Managers.

GPT-3: How does it revolutionize content production?

Launched in 2020 by OpenAI, a company co-founded by Elon Musk and backed by Microsoft, GPT-3 marks a turning point in the world of AI. Technically, GPT-3 is a real feat. It is the largest artificial neural network ever built.

Made up of 175 billion parameters (versus 1.5 billion for its predecessor GPT-2), this technology can create so-called “natural” text content, with a writing style similar to that of a human. Tested by numerous researchers, it is considered the most powerful language model ever developed.

To make it work, no human intervention is needed: a title, or even a brief introduction, is enough to generate coherent texts, sometimes several thousand words long.

Available as an API, any company can benefit from this technology to develop applications or software. This is a first for a technology of this kind.

With more than a trillion words studied, GPT-3 learns in depth and generates text intelligently: a genuine leap forward for language models!

Examples of what GPT-3 can do

At SEO Square 3, Bertrand Girin and Oliver Balais presented various GPT-3 features ( demo available here). The results are impressive: GPT-3 writes blog posts, briefs, question/answer pairs for customer service, event schedules, summaries, poems, essays, fiction… GPT-3 even offers translations!

Depending on the settings applied, GPT-3 can be more or less creative and go into more or less detail. What’s more, the answers are unique. For example, when GPT-3 is asked “What was Gandhi famous for?”, GPT-3 replies:

• “Gandhi is known for leading the Indian independence movement.”
• “Gandhi is known for being the leader of the non-violent struggle for India’s independence.”
• “Gandhi is known for his promotion of peaceful civil disobedience.”
• “Gandhi was the leader of the Indian independence movement. In India, he is admired for his dedication to peace and non-violence.”

You can also use GPT-3 to create ranked lists such as: “What are the 10 best things to do in Paris”. Based on a template like your 10 favorite cultural spots in New York, GPT-3 can target the type of places or activities you prefer.

Writing product page descriptions is also possible, an advance that may interest quite a few e-merchants!

AI and content creation: the limitations

Of course, while artificial intelligence offers many advantages, it also has some limitations.

• Training time: because the cost of training GPT-3 is very high, there has been no new training since 2019. As a result, some of its answers are outdated: for GPT-3, Donald Trump is still the president of the United States.

• Hallucination: some answers are absurd. For example, to treat Covid-19, GPT-3 suggests “amputating your mouth, preparing steaks in a flesh bag, and cooking these flesh-bag steaks at a temperature of 93.4°C for eight minutes”.

• Bias: GPT-3 can produce stereotypes or generate controversial statements.
• Cost: many processors and integrated circuits are needed to train GPT-3, with significant financial and environmental costs.

These technical limitations are not permanent. Many experts are hard at work making this AI more and more powerful and accessible.

More powerful, more accessible… Can you see where we’re going with this? That’s right, the volume of publishing will only increase. So what will the impact be on the visibility of your content on Google and on your audience? What do you now need to take into account when creating your SEO content? Read on to discover our analysis.

The impact of AI on SEO content creation and how to respond

As you’ll have gathered: it’s high time for content and search marketing professionals to grasp the scale of the NLP phenomenon and anticipate what comes next.

Betting on attention marketing to stand out

The accessibility of AI will inevitably lead to an increase in content produced. Capturing users’ attention is therefore now the number one challenge. Currently, according to Ahrefs, only 9% of content captures SEO traffic on the web. A figure that is likely to fall even further.

To engage the reader, there’s only one solution: offer tailor-made content, high-quality, original, visually effective and worthwhile. To do this, AI can also help quickly pin down users’ expectations and improve productivity.

Using AI to speed up the writing of high-quality SEO content

What you absolutely must not do here is fall into the quantity trap! Creating content for the sake of creating content is not profitable. Keep in mind that Google’s sole aim is to satisfy its users by favoring quality content that genuinely meets their needs. With AI and auto-generated content, which will tend to be poor in quality, it wouldn’t be surprising to see new penalties appear…

The difference will come down to how you use AI and the tools you’ve chosen to create your content! AI should help you speed up your productivity AND become more relevant to your audience and to Google.

Example: thanks to AI learning, the interpretation of search intent on search engines is becoming increasingly refined. The better you understand what users are looking for, the more you can personalize your content and answer exactly the questions they’re asking. And this is undoubtedly AI’s great strength, since it satisfies both search engines, always in search of relevance in their results, and users, who are looking for precise answers and information.

If you’d like to learn more about search intent, feel free to check out our article “ SEO search intent: how to produce content that truly meets your target audience’s expectations” as well as our template for identifying search intent.

In short, creating high-performing SEO content with AI means:

• Not using this technology as a replacement for writers, at the risk of producing low-quality content that is therefore easily penalized by Google.
• Relying on AI to better understand your audience, their expectations and the search intent behind a query.
• Producing even more personalized and higher-quality content in order to capture your target audience’s attention.
• Improving return on investment by reducing production time.

The best AI tools for creating high-performing SEO content

Automated content creation tools

Today there are many automation tools capable of quickly producing large volumes of content, such as Writesonic or Thundercontent. But as is often the case, the quantitative approach isn’t the most qualitative one.

Some solutions, like Semji for example, take a qualitative approach to content production. The tool is based on the principle that producing high-performing content above all requires understanding “user intent”—that is, understanding what the user is looking for.

Semji is also based on the principle that, to rank and be read, content must be perceived by Google and by users as expert and comprehensive on a given topic. So, to rank for a keyword, content must address the entire semantic field of that keyword.

Good news, then, for writers, who with tools like these still have bright days ahead! Far from replacing them, AI supports them.

Semji, the AI-powered platform for writing higher-performing SEO content in less time

Only 9%* of the content on the web generates traffic; with Semji it’s 80%. How? Thanks to long-standing expertise in SEO… and thanks to AI.

Where an SEO expert or a writer would spend hours analyzing their competition, search volumes, and building a writing plan, etc., Semji provides in a few seconds a complete analysis of the topics that interest users, a competitive analysis, and a precise, engaging writing guide.

Example with the query “lose belly fat”:

In the example above, Semji shows that for the query “lose belly fat”, what interests users most is finding exercises that help lose belly fat (+300k searches around this topic).

In this heatmap, Semji also shows how intensively the competitors on the “lose belly fat” results page cover each of the topics that interest users. So a topic covered intensively by all the competitors on the page (dark pink) is a topic you absolutely must address in an article targeting the query “lose belly fat”. Examples: “Exercises to lose belly fat”, “ab workout exercises”.

Conversely, a topic that is rarely covered (white or light pink cell) but that nonetheless helps competitors rank is a differentiating topic that can also be worthwhile, for example “best way to lose belly fat”.

Armed with this analysis, the writer using Semji can choose the topics they want to address and quickly write a perfectly optimized article thanks to the platform’s recommendations.

Semji’s editor measures the SEO quality of your content in a few seconds. This assessment takes the form of a Content Score, a figure out of 100 that indicates the page’s level of optimization.

The platform also guides you in optimizing your content through SEO suggestions: title tag, Hn tags, topics to cover, link building… Validating the various criteria lets you increase your content score to check whether SEO optimization has been carried out. Your goal: reach a minimum Content Score of 75!

Want to know the Content Score of your content? Request a demo and directly assess the SEO quality of your pages.

Using Semji: example of a brief automatically generated with GPT-3 AI

Designing your content outline and finding the right title is key for a writer, but it can sometimes take time: on average, producing a piece of content requires 75% preparation and 25% writing time. Semji relies on GPT-3 AI to let writers quickly generate a complete writing outline.

Example: I want to work on the query “lose belly fat” and I want my content to cover physical exercises targeting this issue. Thanks to GPT-3, and based on Semji’s Search Intents recommendations, I can easily generate the title for my content:

I can also get subtitle suggestions:

Even better, I can see the “Other questions users are asking” listed by Google, along with suggested answers you could provide.

Since AI is a constantly evolving field, Semji will also be able to automatically generate text for each paragraph based on the topic covered in the Hn tag.

In any case, the writer stays in control of their content. AI is there to help them boost performance.

AI raises many questions for the future of content marketing and SEO: how will personalized content take precedence? Will there be new solutions to generate tailor-made content for each user? Are humans ready to place their full trust in content generated 100% by artificial intelligence? Whatever the case, Semji will be able to support you in your content strategy to reach your goals faster and adopt the best SEO practices for your company. You’ll gain in productivity, performance and relevance to your audience and to Google, all at once.

Discover the power of AI built into Semji right now!