Marketing Online: AI Is The New Article Spinner

Well, they’re at it again. The junk marketing YouTube Clowns are all a-giggle about yet another supposedly “new way to make it easier” to run an online business. Their socks are rolling up and down and they’re bouncing on the beds like little kids, all lining up to tell you what a FANTASTIC idea it is to use AI to create your online marketing content, and how THEY can either teach you to do it or do it FOR you. For just a few thousand dollars, of course.

A junk marketer’s best Fool Tools are the words “quick” and “easy”. These are the words people are fooled by most often and lose the most money because of. So, when everybody starts yammering about AI all at once, they see the rip-off opportunity of a lifetime.

And yammering they are. It’s all over the news. AI is going generate tremendous medical advances. It’s going to better society. It’s going to create free education. Apparently, it’s also going to replace jobs. It’s going to make the human race go extinct. It’s going to dumb us down, so we can’t think anymore. Congress wants to impose a moratorium on further AI development until they can “understand it better”. (Like Congress ever understands anything!)

No matter what click-bait AI headlines the talking heads are yapping about on the news 24/7, they all serve a purpose for the junk marketers.

The concept “Top of Mind” is very important in marketing. It simply means that when something you sell is always on someone’s mind, you have a much better chance of selling them something. Right now, AI is top of mind.

Familiar with Article Spinners? If you're not, good for you, because Article Spinners are junk online tools used by lazy, unscrupulous marketers to steal other peoples’ original marketing content and try to game the search engines for better ranking.

You may have used one yourself without even knowing it. If you ever had a “VA” (Virtual Assistant) writing marketing articles FOR you, THEY used an Article Spinner to create (and charge you for!) that content.

Which would be why you remember those articles reading like a Martian stereo manual translated to English by way of Urdu.

According to PlagiarismToday.com (yes, that’s actually where Google takes you when you search on Article Spinners; a site called Plagiarism Today!), Article Spinners got their mainstream start with something called ArticleBot in 2005.

They go back a while.

So, what exactly is an Article Spinner as it applies to online marketing?

Basically, when you want to create an article, blog post, social media post, etc. for your online business, you’d search Google for someone ELSE’S article on that same subject. Of course, you’d look for something well-written by an expert on the subject.

Then you’d copy that article and feed it to an Article Spinner. The Article Spinner performs an operation commonly known as “spintax” (spinning syntax) which identifies certain words and phrases in the article and replaces them with other words and phrases (most often based on synonyms) that it deems to be acceptable substitutes.

Software like this is typically connected to databases of synonyms, among other things like sets of basic grammatical rules.

Here’s Wikipedia’s example of how well that works. If the marketing article you want to create mentions the country Great Britain, the word “good” is a synonym for the word “great”. But how obvious is this fake going to be when the spun article replaces “Great Britain” with “Good Britain”?

Uh-huh. And that’s only one VERY obvious example. Most of the time, the issues are much more subtle.

A serious Article Spinner can generate literally thousands of variations of that original article. So, what you end up with is supposed to be a shiny new “original” article based on the work of some unsuspecting professional somewhere that YOU use in your own marketing.

The problem, as I said before, is that spun articles are a crappy substitute for the real thing, and that’s a SERIOUS problem.

There are still plenty of Article Spinners out there today. And guess what?

AI is one of them! Programs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is all the rage in internet marketing scam-land right now, are doing nothing more than spinning articles, just like lazy, unsuccessful marketers have been doing since 2005!

There are only two differences:

1. It finds the expert article to spin on its own, based on what you tell it.
2. It goes really fast.

Other than that, it really does nothing more for your online marketing content than QuillBot, WordTune, SpinBot and all the other 20 or more article spinners that are already out there today.

And pretty much ALL of them claim to be “AI-driven”.

But it sounds cool and new and amazing, which gives the junk marketers the perfect opportunity to use the Fool Tool words “Quick” and “Easy”. And they LOVE it when that happens.

So what’s the real downside of using AI/Article Spinners to create content?

I wanted to get an opinion straight from the virtual horse’s mouth, so to speak. So, I asked ChatGPT what the downside of using AI to write marketing content was.

The following was actually written BY ChatGPT itself, in response to that question:

“One of the biggest risks of using AI for online marketing is that it can trigger spam filters on search engines like Google. These filters, known as "spam brains," are designed to detect and penalize websites that engage in unethical or spammy marketing practices. If your website is flagged by Google's spam brain, it can lead to a significant drop in your search engine rankings, which can ultimately hurt your business's online visibility and revenue.

One way that AI can trigger spam filters is by generating low-quality or duplicate content. AI algorithms can generate articles, blog posts, and other types of content automatically, but if the content is not unique, informative, or engaging, it could be flagged as spam. Similarly, if your AI-generated content contains too many keywords or is stuffed with irrelevant information, it could be penalized by Google.

Another risk of using AI for online marketing is that it can lead to a lack of human touch. While AI can automate various marketing tasks, it cannot replace the human touch that customers crave. Customers want to feel valued and heard, and AI-powered marketing campaigns can come off as robotic or impersonal. This can lead to a lack of engagement, trust, and loyalty from your customers, which can ultimately hurt your bottom line.”

And that’s ChatGPT’s opinion of itself when using it to write (read that steal and spin) your marketing content.

So that gets us to the REAL problem here.

You saw ChatGPT mention Google’s “spam brain”. That refers to a couple of things. One of those things is Google’s Webspam Team.

I’ve seen them described as “a secret group of Google Ninjas”. What they really are is a whole team of very smart engineers at Google whose ONLY reason for existence is to prevent that search engine from being fooled by ANYTHING.

Think about this for a minute. The Google Search Engine currently processes more than 93% of all online searches on the planet. ALL the other search engines combined have to split a lousy 7 percent.

Google is the Mount Olympus of search engines. That’s because it’s the best search engine out there. Why? Because it doesn’t get fooled by junk content.

WHY doesn’t it get fooled by junk content? Because of the Webspam Team.

All these goofy junk marketers are out there selling all these ridiculous tools and apps and services all the time. Keyword tools, marketing tools, sales funnel tools, email tools, yada yada yada. There are a ton of them.

Unfortunately, people buy them because they promise to make things easy. The first problem with those things is that they were never designed to work. They were designed to take your money.

The second problem is the one that the junkyard crew really doesn’t want you to know about. The Google Webspam Team buys them too! Then they reverse-engineer them, tweak the Google algorithm to make sure they don’t work with Google, and then they go to lunch.

The Google Webspam Team has their OWN AI as well. It’s called SpamBrain, as ChatGPT referred to earlier. Given that the Google Webspam Team’s mission is to make sure that Google NEVER gets fooled by anything, and given that they have their OWN AI called SPAMBRAIN to help them fulfill that mission, does anybody really think that Google can’t see AI-generated marketing content coming from a mile away?

Of course they can. Even ChatGPT knows it. Here’s what our little buddy ChatGPT had to say about that when I asked it:

“Google's Spambrain algorithm is designed to identify and penalize websites that engage in spammy or manipulative tactics to rank higher in search results. This includes websites that use low-quality or irrelevant content to manipulate search rankings. AI-generated marketing content can sometimes fall into this category, as it may be low-quality, irrelevant, or overly promotional.

One of the key ways that AI-generated marketing content can trigger Google's Spambrain algorithm is through keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is a tactic that involves overusing specific keywords or phrases in order to manipulate search rankings. AI-powered tools may generate content that is overly optimized for specific keywords, which can result in keyword stuffing and trigger Google's Spambrain algorithm.

Another way that AI-generated marketing content can trigger Google's Spambrain algorithm is through the use of irrelevant or low-quality content. AI-powered tools may generate content that is not relevant to the website's target audience or does not provide value to readers. This can result in a high bounce rate, which indicates that visitors are quickly leaving the website after viewing the content. A high bounce rate can signal to Google that the website is not providing a good user experience, which can hurt the website's ranking.

Additionally, AI-generated marketing content may be overly promotional, which can also trigger Google's Spambrain algorithm. Promotional content may include excessive use of sales language, calls to action, or other marketing tactics that are designed to drive conversions. While these tactics may be effective in some cases, they can also be perceived as spammy or manipulative by Google's algorithm.”

And that's straight from the AI's 'mouth'.

Google has already come out and told everybody that it considers artificially generated content (including AI-created content) to be SPAM. In no uncertain terms.

So, we’re talking about getting flagged by Google for SPAM here. Do you know what that means? If Google flags your website, your blog, your social media or anything else you do online as SPAM, you might as well pick up your marbles, go home and start over under another name. Seriously, it’s that bad.

ChatGPT itself, when asked about these things, cautiously used a lot of modifiers like might, if, maybe and so on. So it’s saying yes, I might give you spammy content. If I give you spammy content. Maybe my content could be flagged as spam.

That’s just the human-programmer-influence in the AI. It’s been programmed to deflect and soften negative information about itself.

The truth is, it’s going to give you a LOT of spammy content, because AI’s don’t write the content themselves. They just grab a whole bunch of seemingly related content from the internet and jam it all together based on synonyms and grammatical rules. Same as Article Spinners have been doing for nearly 20 years.

How could it not give you content that’s spammy?

Even if it isn’t every single time, just ONCE is enough to screw you over with Google.

Do you really want to take that chance just to avoid writing your own content?

Remember, AI, though it stands for Artificial Intelligence, is not artificially intelligent. It’s still just human-coded programming. Using machine learning algorithms to help the code work better and make new connections does NOT make it a living consciousness. For the purposes of this discussion, it’s just a hyped-up Article Spinner. Don’t let the YouTube Vidiots tell you any different.

One final fun fact:

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI /ChatGPT  has openly said that his AI sometimes creates information that isn’t even real. It makes things up, because it relies on human-written content online that may or not be real itself.

He calls that a "hallucinatory" response.

Really???

Look, I’ve been telling people for 20 years that if you want to own a successful business, you have to learn that business. That means learning to write marketing content too. There are no shortcuts.

The easy ways out and shortcuts that people like to think exist are responsible for the 97% of home based business owners who fail in this business.

If you want to learn how to do this right, talk to me. I’ll teach you. It isn’t nearly as hard as you think it is.

You can call me at 888-824-7476; that’s my cell phone, really. You can join a Free Ecommerce Q & A Zoom Meeting with me here.

Ask anything you want; you’ll get the only honest answers you’ll find anywhere online.

And if you haven't done it yet...check out my FREE 11-Part EBiz Insider Video Series.