AI-Generated Work – When Help Becomes a Hindrance

Last week, I mentioned some concerns about how AI risks taking shortcuts, which are counter-productive when we really need original work, not AI-generated work.

You may have seen online that a new Google core update is rolling out this month, focusing on clamping down on AI-generated content. I was talking to a very unhappy company owner recently who had been told by Google that a lot of the content on his website was coming from AI tools, so it was going to be ranked a lot lower on the search engine than if it was original content. He was very angry because he had been paying a marketing company to create unique content.

Clearly, there is a boundary between using AI to achieve an efficient shortcut and being deceitful about how much work is really ours. How can we know when an answer is not unique and specific to our situation but is produced by AI?

AI-Generated Work – Assessment and Uniqueness

Here are a few questions I think we can use to assess if someone has actually done the work and is not passing off AI-generated work as their own.

I think it is helpful to share these criteria upfront before work is done and not just use them to assess the output. This is because knowing the criteria that is used to judge the quality of work encourages people to create quality work in the first place.

Uniqueness assessment criteria:

1. How many sources of reference did you use?
2. What are your sources of reference?
3. What have you learnt from creating this content?
4. Do you think your audience will have the same moments of insight?
5. What do you think is the next piece of content that follows on from what you have written?
6. If you used an AI tool to polish your content, what changes did the AI tool make to your original writing?
7. Why did you think this prompted content was better than your own?

As always, I would love to hear your thoughts, and if you want more content from me, sign up for my newsletter.