It’s not a secret that Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the rise. Thankfully, for now, it’s more in a “How can I help you” kind of way and not the “Hasta la vista” way. Regardless, there are enough movies to caution us against using AI too frivolously. Still, the topic is way too big just to pass it by. Since AI is trying to get into almost all business niches, let’s talk a bit more about using AI in web development and content creation. What are its benefits and weaknesses, and is it OK for you to use it? Let’s find out.

What is AI, and how it has evolved

AI has significantly changed the IT sector in the past few years. Most companies worldwide, especially the software giants, realized that AI is the next big thing. Many believe that the rise of AI will be the 4th industrial revolution.

In practice, Artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to learn and perfect themselves without human interaction. This has been achieved by introducing an IT version of the Darwinian evolution idea, “survival of the fittest,” and infusing it into a computer algorithm. This allows computers and machines to learn from their mistakes and perform better each following time. Something that only a few people can do. Moreover, the learning process is much faster and far easier as the machine basically teaches itself.

Getting to AI was not an easy journey. In fact, IT specialists and scientists have worked hard for more than half a century to get to where we are today. While the idea of artificial intelligence can find its roots in ancient times, it was only in the 1950s that humankind could finally produce such machines capable of independent thought. Naturally, the start was slow, and just like with any great idea, financing was hard at first. Only after 1974, after computers gained much broader recognition as the future of the world, AI research went into overdrive. It took around 50 years and many failures to finally reach the point when AI started working properly.

Some numbers

Today Artificial intelligence is something more than a dream. It’s a reality that’s actually somewhat beneficial. So naturally, about 35% of all companies already use AI, and 42% are looking for ways to implement AI into their business. Moreover, 91.5% of the leading companies worldwide are investing heavily in AI, believing it will lead to at least 25% growth in customer satisfaction. This shows that AI, without a doubt, is here to stay.

Unsurprisingly, its market size has grown to 142.3 billion dollars in 2022 and is estimated to reach 1.85 trillion dollars by 2030. According to PwC, AI will boost the world’s economy to reach 15.7 trillion dollars by 2030, as artificial intelligence will be instrumental for about 26% of it.

Furthermore, according to the World Economic Forum, AI will produce a net increase of 12 million jobs worldwide. Unfortunately, before that happens, an estimated 85 million people will lose their livelihoods, and about 35% of all professions today will be affected by the rise of AI. This puts another ethical factor to the equation, which prons us to discuss the rise of AI even more seriously.

Why the AI discussion is important

Discussing AI in mere numbers is definitely not enough, as there are far too many ethical factors to consider. On paper, AI is an industrial golden age waiting to happen. However, in historical terms, industrial revolutions happen after great social and economic distress. With an ever growing population, snuffing 85 million jobs, even if 97 million jobs will be created in the long run, will create social chaos. Moreover, one of the most intelligent people who ever lived on this planet, Stephen Hawking, warned us that humanity is not ready for AI and that artificial intelligence could be our demise.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should treat AI as taboo. It only means we should take our time and see the benefits and downsides of implementing AI into our world. How will this affect our society, our economy, and our lives?

For now, let’s focus on what we are good at. Let’s see if an AI could help you build a winning website and how you can implement this outstanding technological advancement most efficiently.

AI for web design

Web design and web development as a whole are not excluded from the general AI expansion across industries. On the contrary, this is one niche where AI truly excels. There are a variety of AI engines that can help you create one truly inspiring website without writing a line of code or having any knowledge of design, color schemes, or art. Basically, AI can do it all. But would it be efficient, and how will this affect your website’s performance?

Benefits

At first glance, using AI for creating and maintaining your website can offer you many advantages.

Enhanced UX

Artificial intelligence will immensely improve your website’s user experience. Naturally, this will significantly boost your performance, as 79% of users will abandon your website and search for the same product elsewhere if they don’t like your design. But, more importantly, people simply won’t buy if you haven’t created an easy-to-follow customer journey.

The worst thing about user experience is that all customers have their own expectations. Depending on your niche and product type, they will expect a different layout, information, and a different journey. Naturally, a good web designer can recreate their vision if you give them the data. This is the tricky part. Web designers are not data analysts, and you need to provide them with what you expect from them. Often, designers tasked with creating a user-friendly web design for a certain product recreate their vision of the customer journey on the screen. That, however, is far from optimal, as your customers are a unique set of people, and even if your designer can imagine how they think and what drives them, the decision is still subjective.

This is where AI excels. Artificial intelligence works only objectively. With a good engine, it can gather all the needed information from your current website, gather statistical data from the internet and recreate a design that’s based entirely on data. Naturally, this will enhance your UX immensely.

Increases speed and efficiency

One of the most significant advantages of using an AI web design tool is its unparalleled speed and efficiency. For example, if you need to create a website with unique graphics, pictures, and design, this will take weeks for humans to complete. An AI tool can do that in mere minutes. It will generate layouts, suggest color schemes, and even write the entire code.

Moreover, the AI can streamline the entire quality assurance and testing phases without needing additional personnel and for a fraction of the time. This will make the whole process much faster, and your website’s code will be clean and declogged from the very get-go. This will make your website as fast as your hosting plan allows it to be. Naturally, this will benefit your entire performance and enhance your profits, as the faster your website works, the more people will stay on it for the journey.

Scalability

If you are fresh on the market, you will definitely be looking for designs that can offer scalability. Artificial intelligence tools are designed with this specific aspect in mind. For example, if you have an e-commerce website and your products go viral, you will need the capacity to handle many more users and transactions. Also, you will want to increase your product portfolio. Naturally, this requires some infrastructure which, if made by humans, will take time. Retailers know far too well that customers have money to spare, but they rarely have time to spare.

An AI-powered tool can automatically make the needed changes. It can analyze your user’s behavior, identify patterns, and make suggestions on how to enhance your website design to accommodate your growing customer base.

As you can imagine, this will have a huge impact on your profits, popularity, and authority.

An easy, cost-efficient start

Artificial intelligence-generated web designs are an outstanding solution if you don’t have the funds to hire the professionals needed to create a genuinely good website. For example, if you are new and lack the funds to start big, you might want a simple but good-looking webpage to attract people and convince them to buy your products. In this case, an AI-generated web design will be sufficient. But, more importantly, it will be cost-efficient, as you can have your website operational in under an hour and start selling products immediately.

Downsides

Naturally, using AI-powered web design has its limitations. It’s not something you’d want to disregard, as, in the long run, it can negatively affect your website’s performance. So let’s discuss the downsides of AI in web design in more depth.

Lack of imagination

This is probably the biggest problem of AI-generated web designs. They lack any imagination. AI is devoid of imagination, so it simply can’t think of anything innovative. It can’t push progress, meaning you will only imitate the best practices, albeit originally and uniquely. This might be OK for when you are starting your business. However, in the long run, if you want to become an industry leader or authority figure in your niche, you can’t imitate and follow. You need to lead.

If you become overly dependent on AI-powered web design, your website will be nothing more than a cookie-cutter version of something more imaginative and better.

Lacks understanding of human behavior

While an AI can read and analyze user data perfectly, it will never be able to understand human behavior. This means that it can create one perfectly optimized design for your audience, yet still, no one would visit. That’s because human behavior is not based only on logic but, more often than not, on emotions. So while an AI can predict that people are most actively purchasing a product between 2 and 3 PM, for example, it can’t anticipate in what mood these people are getting into your website, so it can enhance the feeling that pushes them to buy.

Customer behavior is far more reliant on subjective rather than objective factors. Thus it’s practically impossible for an AI to fully grasp why people act as they do. At least not for now.

It’s Overlydependant on data

That’s hardly a downside if you have the data, but still, you can’t put all factors related to decision-making into numbers. If you use your own data, you risk feeding the AI your subjective understanding of your users. For example, many business owners have an ideal buyer persona. So they may push AI to construct the website based on this persona’s needs. Naturally, if their persona is not accurately portrayed, this will lead to a website customized for the wrong audience.

On the other hand, if the AI is gathering data from the internet, it may stumble upon incorrect data, affecting the product’s quality and accuracy. In short, if the data used to train the AI is biased or incomplete, it can produce flawed designs or recommendations.

Privacy issues

Using AI can negatively affect customer perception of your business, as 94% of users expect companies to be fully transparent in their methods and information gathering. The problem with AI is that it’s self-taught, and at some point, no one really knows what exact data it collects. Yes, you can limit the AI from gathering specific types of data. Still, you won’t be able to inform your users precisely what data you are collecting from them. Furthermore, this will be a legal issue if you want to enter the EU market, where they have a GDPR requirement where website owners need to actively ask for consent for gathering any data.

AI for content

Creating content for your website regularly is one of the most challenging aspects of having a business. For your web content to be effective and reach its goals, you must have a vast understanding of how to communicate your ideas through content. AI offers a quick and relatively cheap solution to this problem. However, before you rush into firing your entire content marketing team, you must first understand the benefits and downsides of using AI for your content.

Benefits

Having an AI create your web content has many benefits, and one can hardly argue that AI can make this challenging task much easier and faster. Here are the main advantages of using such tools

Unparalleled speed

The speed at which an AI can provide you with content is simply incomprehensible. No one can generate a text of such quality in such a short time as an AI. Moreover, you guarantee perfect readability, zero grammar or spelling mistakes, and a comprehensive and well-written text. Furthermore, you can teach your AI to create 100% unique texts, which will enhance the quality of your text. All you need to do is write the task in a chatbot such as Chat GPT, and in about 10 seconds, you will get high-quality content for your blog or website.

It helps with writer’s block

Writer’s block is the bane of any content writer. Anyone who stood before the white sheet and had to generate a high-quality text knows the pressure of starting strong and persuasive. An AI tool can definitely help with this. It can create your writing plan, research the topic, or even write it down. However, don’t overtrust the AI generator, as it has some limitations we will discuss in a bit.

It’s highly cost-efficient

If you are new on the market, you probably won’t have the funds to hire professional content writers to take over your content. Though they bring a lot of value in the long run, content writers are generally expensive. So not everyone can afford to pay a couple hundred dollars for SEO-optimized articles. On the other hand, an AI subscription costs around 100 dollars annually. So, for a fresh business, this is a cheap way to generate content and get noticed by the public.

Better targeting

Content differs in many ways depending on the channel, target audience, how far down the sales and marketing funnel they are, and other factors. Usually, when a content writer is given a task, they want to know the purpose of the text. This way, they can use the particular tone and writing style that will best suit the channel and the targeted audience. If you are writing your content without any marketing know-how, your content is probably not optimized for the media you are using. An AI generator will fix that. These bots will use data to determine the most efficient way to write audience-oriented content. They will scrape the internet for the best examples and write unique content. So, this will immensely improve the content’s effect on your audience.

Most importantly, it will retain your brand voice regardless of the tone needed for the channel. That’s one of the most challenging aspects of writing content. One that comes with a lot of practice and understanding of the different media and the audiences that use them.

Downsides

Unfortunately, AI is still not quite there when it comes to writing quality content that can reach particular goals. It’s better than nothing, of course, and it certainly has its benefits. However, the downsides in this case far outweigh the pros.

Lack of character

Regardless of the content at hand, if it’s devoid of character, it won’t be nearly as entertaining as anything written by a human. That’s because writing usually is based on the emotions you infuse into the text. Whether it’s a pure scientific text or a passionate speech, you are trying to relay an emotional idea behind your work. You want to forward your feelings about the project and describe your passion. An AI cannot do that, as it’s devoid of emotions and can’t understand them. That’s why usually AI-generated content is dry and factual. They have no opinion or evaluation of the facts, which is definitely not a characteristic of a leader.

Lacks personal experience

Another fatal flaw of AI-generated content is the lack of personal experiences. It can provide you with much information on almost any topic. Unfortunately, it can’t give you a unique perspective on the task. For example, if you want to represent a product, you may list all its features. However, if you haven’t used it yourself, if you haven’t felt how it handles and what it can do, you won’t be able to persuade anyone to try it out. That’s one of the main reasons people read reviews of the products before buying them. They search for subjective, personal experiences.

Limited research capabilities

Another huge problem of AI-generated content is the limited research capabilities. To be efficient, an AI needs data. However, as a machine, it’s unable to estimate if this data is biased or genuine. Moreover, it will often scrape information from the internet, which introduces plagiarism problems and some questions about the source’s reliability. Most importantly, AI is only as dependable as its training protocol. For example, the most popular free AI tool Chat GPT has constant data training but has its knowledge cutoff in September 2021. So you can imagine how much your industry and customer behavior has changed over the past year and a half.

Devalued content

Arguably the biggest downside of AI-generated content is the fact that Google and other search engines will devalue it. In their most recent helpful content update, Google was adamant that they wouldn’t rank content devoid of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. AI generators arguably can only provide some limited expertise. That’s hardly enough to enjoy the pleasures of being on Google’s first page. So, while it’s better than nothing, AI content will cause more harm than good in the long run.

How to effectively use AI on your website

Despite the negatives, it seems that AI is here to stay. So you might as well use it to your advantage. Naturally, to be most efficient, you must use its benefits while avoiding the downsides.

For starters, if you can afford a web designer or a content writer, at least for now, it’s far better to trust them with your projects. AI-generated websites and content are an acceptable solution if you are just starting your business endeavors. However, using such help will only bring drawbacks if you are already an established brand.

In general, AI tools are a great way to create a frame for your work. It can also help you do some tedious, time-consuming tasks. Still, unfortunately, they are not yet capable of entirely replacing the human touch in website development and content creation.