Publishing written content on the web is no longer the straightforward activity it once was. Although the basic process has remained the same — someone writes a piece, and someone else checks it for quality and accuracy — a major shift has occurred in how content is created. Articles, reports, and even marketing communications are now frequently generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs within seconds. Not only is there a huge amount of copy available at the click of a button, but the content itself is increasingly of a high quality.
The opportunity for organizations to produce massive amounts of written work is in direct opposition to the tremendous risk of publishing incorrect information, reusing others’ content, or generating content that is completely original yet very poor. Because an automated system is generating the text, it cannot verify the truth for you. Instead, it will keep generating text, confident in its own abilities, but in most cases, it will be totally inaccurate.
Understanding the Risks of Unverified Content
Relying on automatically generated content to represent a company poses several risks, as it can undermine its credibility and reputation with readers, clients, and industry peers. One of the biggest risks, however, is that the organization publishing the content will be held responsible for its accuracy and wording.
Facts are often not verified by language models when generating text, as their primary goal is to produce human-like content as quickly and efficiently as possible. This means a single incorrect fact, such as a misstated statistic or a misattributed quote, can have a significant impact and undermine an entire report. Secondly, an organization’s tone and brand voice are constantly at risk of being watered down when using automated writing tools. The generic wording and predictable structure of such content can tarnish a company’s unique voice over time. Last but not least, the risks of intellectual property and originality issues when using automated content-generation tools, such as web-based writing software, must not be underestimated.
And this is why a rigorous verification procedure should be put in place to ensure that, even when using technology for content, an organization’s publishing of content is always protected.
Establishing Human Editorial Oversight
Content verification – the most important step of publishing written content! Technology can assist with generating first drafts, creating outlines, or even designing the document in question. For the final review of content, however, humans are irreplaceable.
A simple fact check is needed to verify the content’s accuracy, including statistics, historical dates, and technical information about products and services. If the AI-generated content contains references to external sources, such as studies or industry surveys, verify the content of those documents and validate the original study’s context and the numbers cited in the article. The editorial team must ensure that all assumed knowledge has been addressed, especially when the content requires in-depth knowledge of a specialized subject or industry that is regulated at the federal or state level.
This form of criticism needs to be applied on a larger scale as well. The editor of the automatically written content must read the text from beginning to end. He has to check whether the arguments in the individual paragraphs are consistent with one another and whether the overall message of the text is logical and coherent.
Implementing Technical Verification Tools
It’s also important to note the software that can perform many of the verification tasks mentioned above. Specialized platforms allow one to analyze any text for signs of automated machine output and plagiarism.
Many editorial workflows include the implementation of an AI Detector such as GPTZero to analyze output for ‘machine-generated’ behavior, spot repeated sentences, and detect structural and vocabulary repetition that requires heavy human rewriting. This tool can give managers and editorial teams a degree of assurance over the work of internal teams and even freelance contributors.
Carry out plagiarism checks. Newly generated text can often read very similarly to published articles. Make sure that you use scanning software to check for plagiarism in all of your content. Ensure that all of your ideas have been properly attributed in your published work.
Developing Clear Organizational Guidelines
Verification should not be a last check. In fact, verification is best done as part of a clear process that all employees follow. That process can be significantly strengthened by clearly outlining an organization’s standards for published content.
Clear rules on the use of technology: Define in detail which stages of content creation can be supported by automated text generation and which must be done by a human.
Provide a set of criteria against which to measure work completed by others (within a company or outsourced to others). A simple checklist is fine for tracking the source of information, verifying facts, ensuring adherence to your organization’s style guide, and confirming a passing technical ‘plagiarism’ scan.
Make Sure the Writers Know Too. Prepare writers for the capabilities and limitations of the generative technology that they can use for such tasks as brainstorming, outlining, and even first drafts. Have them verify the work they wrote against the original sources for accuracy and complete any necessary polishing before submitting for publication.
Make transparent decisions concerning use of automated tools in research or production. Indicate when content generated by automated tools is published under the organization’s name.
Your work will remain high quality, even as production scales, if everyone on your content team knows the rules.
Balancing Speed with Quality
Waiting can save time. Fact-checking, correct wording, and ensuring the originality of content only need to be done once — before it is published — whereas correcting errors and fixing reputational damage in published content is much more time-consuming.
Taking the time to verify information, ensuring proper word choice, and ensuring original work will save time in the long run. Fixing a mistake published to the web or recovering from damage to a company’s reputation takes a lot of time and energy. Implementing clear guidelines, verification tools, and quality-focused human editors to manage published content will result in content that is not only published quickly but also provides value to the audience and builds trust with them.