February 2024
Since Content5 was founded, the information and research environment has continuously changed. Now the next big technological leap has arrived that will shape how we research and work: artificial intelligence (AI). In addition to figuring out how we can best integrate AI into our research, we are particularly concerned with the extent to which AI affects the quality of online content and the findability of reliable and high-quality information. After a year of using AI, it is becoming clear that searching for quality information is becoming more difficult.
Content from the assembly line and AI-generated SEO dilute search results
According to research by Leipzig University, Bauhaus University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.ai), the use of AI has a direct impact on search engine results. A major problem is SEO spam, which influences the rankings of search results and can now be generated even faster with the help of AI. Google News search also suffers from an abundance of this: As 404 Media recently reported, Google News promotes partly plagiarised, AI-generated content. Google is attempting to combat it. However, since the company does not check whether something was written by an AI or a human, more and more AI-generated content is finding its way into Google News searches.
In addition, the many bots on the internet are now also supplied with AI-generated content. This makes it even easier to spread fake news and disinformation via social media and other channels. The IT business magazine CIO, for example, reported on this.
As a result, the percentage of plagiarised and false or at least erroneous content on the internet is likely to increase further in the future. This also makes it more difficult for us to find and verify relevant content. For our employees, the use of professional, usually fee-based databases with validated content and in-depth training is, in this context, becoming increasingly important. We also need to continue to adapt our search strategies. While Google has been the search engine of choice for a long time, we are increasingly turning to alternatives. For example, we are now using AI ourselves to find more and better information on a world wide web flooded with AI-generated articles. Ironic, but it works.
