Is ChatGPT-Generated Content Harmful for Clinics?

What is in this article?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot that can hold human-like conversations, translate and provide users with information.

It can also write genuinely good content.

And now, as Google has stated openly, "appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines", the question arises: should we use it to produce health content?

There are several matters to be settled about using ChatGPT for health writing and SEO, and how to use it.

Let us explore now:

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool that lets users hold human-like conversations with an artificial intelligence chatbot.

ChatGPT can identify, summarise, translate, predict and generate large amounts of content based on what it has learned from a large amount of public data.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

Imagine a child being given an encyclopaedia of world knowledge. After reading the encyclopaedia, that child can be trained to answer simple questions. As they understand the information better they can answer more complex questions more intelligently. Over time they keep learning from the kinds of question they are asked and from which information is probably the best answer.

In ChatGPT's case, the 'learning encyclopaedia' is a pile of data, a large part of it the internet (data up to 2021). Its 'training' rests on understanding natural, or human, language so that it 'understands' the questions or instructions people ask. From there it can predict what kind of answer those questions are looking for.

To sum up, ChatGPT learns as it goes, improves its answers and stores information for later use.

At the foundation of this technology lie several scientific innovations:

NLP: natural language processing (NLP) helps machines understand language by breaking written or spoken words down into smaller components, rather as your English teacher did with Shakespeare!

ML: machine learning (ML) lets machines train themselves through trial and error, as a human learns (to increase their accuracy and their ability to solve problems).

The ability to produce content quickly and easily is one of the reasons you have heard so much about it recently (in relation to SEO content in particular).

How It Differs From Other Chatbots

It is important to note that AI-generated content tools are not new.

Tools such as Hubspot Chatbot Builder, Salesforce Einstein, Jasper, ContentBot and WP-Chatbot have been helping businesses automate content production, repetitive customer support, marketing and even sales tasks for years.

But here is what is new…

It uses a large data set.

ChatGPT has been trained with an enormous amount of data (chatbots generally use a far narrower data set), which means it can carry out far more language-related tasks than other chat tools.

It uses conversational language and can answer follow-up questions.

Unlike other chatbots, ChatGPT remembers your dialogue and uses previous questions and answers to determine its later responses.

It admits its mistakes.

ChatGPT is willing to admit wrong answers when a user queries a response. But for that, the user has to spot the wrong answer or the misunderstood question and give feedback in their next query.

It challenges incorrect premises.

ChatGPT can admit its own mistakes and challenge incorrect user queries.

It refuses inappropriate requests.

ChatGPT has been trained to refuse racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic or other discriminatory or hateful queries.

ChatGPT and Google

Google states that appropriate use of AI-generated content is not against its guidelines when certain conditions are met.

Google's consistent guidance on automatically generated content over the years is: "Using automation—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies."

But they aim to reward original, high-quality content that shows the characteristics of what we call "expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness".

That means if businesses use AI-generated content to create original, high-quality, user-focused content that demonstrates those qualities, they are more likely to be rewarded with a higher page ranking by Google's search algorithms.

In Google's most recent update on 8 February it repeated its guidance on AI-generated content: "Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high-quality results to users for years."

That means, at least for now, it is not possible for ChatGPT to be used to produce reliable, high-quality health content, and here is why:

Its answers and information may be wrong or incomplete.

An experienced editor always needs to review it to verify the accuracy of the information.

Here is an example of the incorrect information I have come across during my own experience:

A lack of empathy.

ChatGPT has been trained to be neutral and polite. It does not produce emotional content. Expressing empathy and emotion humanises your brand and improves the patient experience.

It does not understand your audience.

AI-generated content is not aware of the subjects your audience cares about or the language that resonates with them.

Its knowledge is limited to 2021.

Because it collected data from 2021 and earlier, it can get things wrong. It is important that your content team verifies every AI-generated response. That ensures the information provided, and the information you share with your patients, is current and accurate.

A lack of experience.

Google has always had strict content guidelines for the health industry. Most recently it folded a new quality consideration, experience, into those guidelines. As a result, all health content should demonstrate:

a. Experience

This covers first-hand knowledge or expertise on the subject. Health content becomes more trustworthy when it is created or reviewed by someone experienced, skilled and holding expertise.

b. Expertise

All content should come from a trustworthy source (for example an established health professional or provider with the appropriate qualifications and credentials).

c. Authoritativeness

Your content and the websites linking back to your content (backlinks, for example) should prove your business is an authority in the sector or the field of expertise.

d. Trust

Perhaps the most important of the four qualities: your website should have signals demonstrating its trustworthiness (a secure domain (SSL), trust seals, patient reviews, timely content and so on).

In next week's blog post we go deeper into the newest member, experience. But for now, ChatGPT cannot deliver these characteristics through automatically generated content.

Vagueness and a lack of clarity.

For ChatGPT to work properly you have to be careful, specific and extremely clear with the information or instructions you give it, which can take time. Otherwise you risk running into a garbage-in, garbage-out situation.

5 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT for SEO and Content Marketing

You may not want to take a Google penalty by using AI-generated content, but you can use ChatGPT's comprehensive data set to help you write better, better-informed content:

Keyword research and analysis

Traditional keyword research is time-consuming. ChatGPT can speed that process up. Just type in a few of your target keywords and ask it to give you a list of related ones. ChatGPT will readily provide a list based on its understanding of search results. Some examples of the terms it returned when I asked for a list of long-tail keywords for "paediatric dentist":

a. Best paediatric dentist near me
b. Children's dental care services
c. Experienced paediatric dentistry specialist
d. Paediatric dentist for children with special needs
e. Anxiety-free paediatric dental treatment

Developing content strategy

Wild, but true. You can ask ChatGPT to sketch out a content marketing strategy for a particular subject and it will return a high-level set of tactics. I could not resist and asked it to sketch a content marketing strategy for healthcare marketing. It came back with an eight-step set of tactics. Flawed though they are, those steps would help anyone speed the process up.

Understanding search intent better

Unlike Google, which takes search queries and simply finds the best available answer, ChatGPT tries to provide more information by refining your query.

Content generator

You can tell ChatGPT you are writing a blog on a particular subject and ask it to generate a headline. I tried it and got interesting results:

a. Request: generate a few headline options for a blog about using ChatGPT for health websites

Response:

"ChatGPT for Health Websites: Innovative Tool or Dangerous Gamble?"

"Navigate the Pros and Cons of Using Online Medical Advice: Examining the Advantages and Disadvantages of Using ChatGPT"

"The Future of ChatGPT in Health Content: Exploring the Benefits and Drawbacks"

"Health Websites and ChatGPT: Balancing Convenience With Accuracy and Safety"

Meta tag generator

You can ask ChatGPT to generate an SEO meta tag for a web page. I continued the conversation above and asked it to write a meta description for the same blog post, for example. The result was quite a good meta description, but long enough that Google would like it trimmed.

a. Request: write a meta description for a blog post for health websites using the keywords "what ChatGPT is" and "how to use ChatGPT?".

Response:

Learn how to use ChatGPT, the powerful language model, for health websites. Discover what ChatGPT is and how it can improve your website's user experience. Read our comprehensive guide now.

An Update to Add:

In a recent announcement, Bing, a direct competitor of Google's, integrated OpenAI's GPT-4 model and is offering search users a ChatGPT-like experience. This model has been trained with current crawl data, which means it does not have the 2021 data limitation ChatGPT has.

Although this feature is currently offered to a limited audience — including some who got unsettling results, among them a New York Times writer — it reminds us that AI-generated content is becoming more widespread.

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