Mind Readings: Voluntary Content Grades and AI

In today's episode, let's talk about content grades. No, not the grades you get in school and not even the kinds of grades that you get on like a bottle of maple syrup. Let's talk about voluntary labeling. For those who don't know, the Motion Picture Association of America was formed way back in like the 19, I want to say 1940s. I'd have to go back and look at the actual Wikipedia article.

Um the folks at Free Conomics did a fascinating episode on um the evolution of movie ratings, but it is one of the few times when uh an industry chose to self-regulate, chose to uh come up with regulatory stuff so that the government wouldn't do it for them. Um, because at the time there was a great deal of concern about um well, all sorts of stuff from adult content to violence to even um giving screen time to certain minority groups, right? Um this was certainly not in Hollywood's progressive era back in the 20s and 30s. And so the Motion Picture Association of America came about as a way for the industry to self-regulate. In doing so, they have they've had their controversies over the years, but for the most part, they successfully kept the government at bay, right?

They successfully kept the government at arm's reach to say, hey, we're we're gonna look out for America's youth or whatever the excuse was and make sure that things are clearly labeled so that you know the wrong content is not being shown to the wrong people. So, what does this have to do with artificial intelligence and content marketing? If we want, as an industry of marketers and AI professionals, if we don't want the government kind of sticking its nose in, because let's face it, the government and modern technology don't exactly get along really well. They are not super compatible, we should be thinking about voluntarily doing stuff like content labeling. For example, suppose you have a blog post.

Who wrote it? Do you know? Right? It was a machine, was it a person? We don't know.

What if you had sort of three different grades? Right? You have AI-led, where the machine did the majority of the work, right? So it's essentially a machine-generated piece of content. Second category would be AI-assisted, where a human did the majority of work, but not all the work.

Maybe the AI did the outline, maybe the AI did some copywriting, uh, maybe the AI did some proofreading or grammar checking. There was some mechanical intervention that makes it not purely human. And then the third category would be purely human. This content was created by humans with no uh artificial intelligence assistance whatsoever. Having those grades on content would make it easy for people to understand what they were reading.

Um provide that level of disclosure saying, hey, this content was done by a human with help of a machine, or this content was done by a machine, uh, or this content was done solely by a human with nothing else. In doing so, this could be a very good thing for a couple of different reasons. First, obviously, transparency and disclosure, those are good things. Generally speaking, those are good things. And people should be able to understand you know the ingredients uh of a piece of content, same way that you know we kind of have uh all these laws about the ingredients in a product, right?

You know, you have to tell people what's in the jar. Um, and then it is up to the individual, is the individual's um respite right and responsibility to decide do I want to consume this or not, right? Like, hey, this thing contains you know 18 different kinds of fat, and it'll probably give you a caron area within 45 minutes. And so there will be some people like I'll eat that, right? Um, you might have, hey, this content is purely AI-led.

We're just making you know, using machines to crank out the content. And there will be some people who'll be like, Yeah, I want that. Other folks will have say, Yeah, I only want to consume purely human content. But labeling it is good. The second thing it may do is, and this is important for writers in particular, content creators, is it may help create a premium around purely human content.

Because let's face it, AI helps us scale, it helps us do stuff faster, it helps us do stuff better. And if you want that genuine, authentic, you know, certified organic uh human content, being able to label it as such means that you can you can compare it, see how it performs versus AI content, and then presumably original human, you know, purely human content probably will perform slightly better. Um, that label might become a badge of value in and of itself and help keep folks who are content creators, who are writers, etc., help keep them employed, right? If there's a market demand for purely human, you know, certified purely human content, um, that could be a nice shot in the arm for folks who are uh content creators who are want to make sure their jobs and their their you know freelancing or whatever is not taken over by machines. So give some thought to that.

I'm gonna start doing this on the content I write on my personal website, just say, you know, is this purely human? Is this AI assisted? Most of my content is AI assisted. Um, for example, this blog post, it's me talking about the thing, but the transcript, machine generated. And we've I've said this for a really long time.

If you go back to blog posts, you know, years ago, you'll see this is a machine-generated transcript. This would be AI-assisted content. It is not purely human because a machine was used to help make part of it. Right? Um, purely human would be like this the almost timely newsletter on Sundays.

That is there's no part of that that the machine is writing the content, even partially, right? Even even as you know, transcript stuff. That is purely human written. So that is that would be that would fall into the purely human category. But if you are a content creator uh or you're a content publisher and you are thinking about the use of AI, you might want to adopt this simple labeling system to help readers get an understanding of what they have, you know, what they're looking at in front of them, and uh perhaps even provide a bit of uh bolstering for the human content creators on your staff.

That's today's show. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.