SEO and the AI tsunami

AI tech has been utilized within search engine algorithms and interfaces for some time, and more recently seems poised to revolutionize the publishing / SEO side of search as well, most obviously through chatbots’ influence on copywriting and new media. In my opinion the latter threatens to be a Pyrrhic victory for website owners who rush in to take advantage of this seemingly cheap and high quality content. I’m not convinced that chatbot text, no matter how seemingly sophisticated and polished, will ultimately be rewarded in the SEO coin of the realm, which has always been incoming links from high quality sites from the early heady days of Backrub. That’s not to say that websites can’t rank well for niche keywords without inbound links from the New York Times or some highly authoritative site like that: they can, though the more niche the better, as competing within an established market takes more time and effort. I agree with experts in linguistics and literature that ChatGPT and similar AI entities are not fundamentally creative, insightful or meaningful even if they can produce grammatically correct responses based on factual information. Chatbots can’t truly synthesize, analyze or extrapolate from information the way humans can. They don’t compose thoughts or deeply understand the words they produce, but rather function as linguistic pattern and prediction calculators, stringing together phrases and sentences by choosing what particular word should most likely follow another one based upon their statistical distribution within the vast databases of texts they are “trained on.” Chatbots are arguably just exceptionally slick plagiarization tools which, under the cloak of anonymous HTML spiders, scrape text from the real creators: human writers and performers who are unfortunate enough to have their words lost in the vast oceans of public domain content (effectively, if not legally) on the web. So far authors’ creations have remained largely unprotected, copyright-wise, but there are numerous lawsuits working their way through the courts which aim to challenge the current status quo. While AI may provided a significant leg up for publishers in the short term, I am convinced that Google and Bing and other search engines will ultimately stick to their tried and true guns, at least in terms of their organic search results, which has always been to recommend the best possible websites to the search queries of their end users.