AI
I let the AI write it
A site with two hundred and twenty-eight automatically generated articles. What worked, what did not, and what I would never hand to a machine.
An artificial intelligence writes a decent article in two minutes at almost no cost. What it does not do is decide what to write about, notice when it is wrong, and put its own face to it. On one of our own sites they have been running for months: two hundred and twenty-eight articles published, and three problems nobody tells you about.
Everybody asks me, always with the same face on: «So the copy is written by artificial intelligence now?». Yes. The long answer is this article, because I actually did it, on a site of ours, not in a trial run. And the things I learned are not in the videos.
Writing is the easy part. Knowing what to write is the trade.
What I built, in two lines
A single-subject site with a program inside that every day picks the topic, writes the piece, makes itself an image and publishes. Nobody touches anything. It has been going for months!
The cost is the first surprise. It runs on a free model and the images come from a service that asks nothing at these volumes: zero euro per article, cover image included. Not bad, eh?
What works better than I expected
The single page holds up. Eight hundred words on a narrow subject, written by a machine in 2026, are indistinguishable from a mediocre piece with a person's name on it. Genuinely! And the consistency is science fiction: no colleague publishes two articles a day for months without missing a beat. Nobody.
The tedious part runs smoothly too, the part we humans always put off: titles, meta descriptions, structured data, links from one piece to another. The machine does not forget and does not get bored.
The three places where it broke
And here comes the part the videos do not show you.
First: they all resembled each other. Same kind of character, same angle, same breathing. Taken one at a time they were fine; read in a row they looked stamped from a mould. Because they were. I had to build a forced rotation of characters to break the sing-song.
Second: my own automated check told me what I wanted to hear. I had written two lines of code to verify that no people appeared in the photographs. Verdict: forty-six per cent. On a site about nothing but dogs. A mad number, and indeed it was wrong: it counted a hand as a «person» too. The real figure was eight! If I had not looked at that number with suspicion, I would have kept a check that always passes for months.
Third: things break quietly. One article went out with the placeholder image instead of the photograph, because a function was never being called. No error, no warning. A public page gone wrong, sitting there for days, until a person saw it.
That is the real cost of automation, the one nobody puts in the quote: somebody has to look at what comes out. Not every day. But look at it.
What I would never hand to a machine
- Deciding what to write about. The subject comes from what clients ask you on the phone, and only you know that.
- Your company's numbers. If it invents a price or a reference, the damage lands on your name.
- The pages that sell. Home, services, about: that is where people decide whether to write to you or move on.
- The voice. A machine writes correctly. Recognisable is another matter entirely!
Does it make sense for your company?
It comes down to one thing: how many subjects you genuinely have. If you sell in a niche with hundreds of small, repeated questions inside it, a system like this builds you an archive in six months that you would never build by hand. If instead you have five pages and a short catalogue, forget it: what you need is five pages written well, and nothing more!
In between sits the route we recommend nearly every time: the machine drafts, a person reads it back and signs it. It costs you a few hours a month and saves you discovering in January that your site talks like everybody else's. Try it on ten pieces before building a factory on top of it. If you want to work out where to start, write to us.
- Writing costs nothing. Checking what comes out costs real time: budget for it.
- Look at automated checks with suspicion: mine said 46% where the truth was 8%.
- The pages that bring customers get written by hand. The archive, that can be automated.
Frequently asked questions
Do AI-written articles hurt your ranking?
No, if they are useful. Google judges the content, not who typed it. It penalises useless pages, and a machine produces useless ones far faster than a person: that is the risk, not the tool.
What does having an AI write your articles cost?
The text costs a few cents, and with free models even less. The real cost is the time of whoever checks the output and decides the subjects: that stays human work, and it is worth budgeting for from the start.
Can you tell an article was written by a machine?
One article at a time, hardly ever. Ten in a row, always: they all have the same rhythm and the same structure. It is the hardest fault to see from inside, because every piece taken alone looks fine.