The issue of AI generated content has been the cause of a lot of discussion lately and with good reason. This technology has the potential to change the way content is produced but there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed. Besides the ethics of it, which are probably too diverse for me to discuss here, there is also the issue of quality. Having listened to all of the discussion about AI, I was curious to see how it would tackle writing a blog post and tried Google Bard, a chatbot released by Google which is currently in the experimental stage. The results were problematic and so I thought it worth pointing out the problems with AI generated blog posts and why I won’t be rushing to use AI to make my content anytime soon.
Let’s start with a quick test that I ran before I started writing this article. Out of curiosity, I asked Google Bard to generate a blog post about immortalliumblog.com. The .com part proved to be a problem so I asked the same question, saying immortalliumblog instead. What ended up coming back was a complete mess that stated that immortalliumblog was about the future of technology and its impact on humanity, directing me then to some articles from various websites while claiming that they were blog posts. How this AI came up with this is a mystery to me so I tried one last time asking the question but separating immortallium from the word blog. The result that came back did at least correctly identify that I, Eoghan O’Connell, created the blog with the intent to cover anime, manga and video games. However, the information that it got incorrect was overwhelming. For one, it claimed that I set up this blog in 2021 while immortalliumblog.com was actually released in late 2019, as evidenced by this first blog post that I ever published. Additionally, it claimed that I not only covered the latest news and trends with regards to anime, manga and video games but also wrote reviews of popular titles, something that I have not done, instead leaving my reviews for other outlets such as YouTube and UK Anime Network. Finally, it provided some links which it claimed led to my most popular blog posts but, in fact, led to a variety of completely unrelated websites.
Now, I think it’s fair to say that I’m not the most popular website on the internet and that my relative obscurity could’ve tainted the results. Therefore, I thought to look at some more objective and well-known topics that should not be short on information. Asking the program about what the first vampire manga was, it came back to me with Vampire Hunter D and Dance in the Vampire Bund. Now, I don’t claim to know what the first vampire manga ever released was but I do know that Osamu Tezuka released a manga called “The Vampires” from 1966-67. I corrected it, bringing up that Osamu Tezuka’s Don Dracula predated all of the titles he mentioned and he acknowledged his mistake but then claimed that Don Dracula was one of the most important manga of all time, something I highly doubt as, even within Tezuka’s body of work, I rarely see it mentioned.
At this point, I was seriously sceptical of how useful Google Bard could be so I decided to go even more recent on a topic even more widely known, Sony’s PC ports. I’ve spoken before about the Sony games that I’d love to see come to PC and also about my frustration with their current strategy and thought that it’d be interesting to see what Google Bard had to say. When asking what Sony games he’d consider to be a priority to port to PC, he responded with The Last of Us, Uncharted, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn and Bloodborne. While it’s true that Bloodborne has yet to be ported to PC, much to my confusion and frustration, the other games have all seen PC ports released and I communicated this to Google Bard. His response left me floored as he acknowledged that they had been released on PC but claimed that The Last of Us had been ported in 2020 and, when correcting him, followed up with an apology, claiming that it had been released in September of 2023. Perhaps my favourite moment came when I asked him for more games that he’d like to see ported to PC and he responded with Bloodborne 2, a game that doesn’t even exist!
That’s not to say that Google Bard hasn’t proved to be helpful on occasion. Sometimes typing in a topic will bring up several titles that I don’t recognise which allows me to look into them when researching for an article but that’s about it. Accuracy is paramount when producing articles and the fact that Google Bard makes so many mistakes results in me second-guessing every line that it writes unless I definitively know that it’s true. This may change someday but, currently, I firmly believe that it’s best to write blog posts from scratch, doing your own research and writing everything in your own words.
Let me know your thoughts AI generated blog posts and my pointing out the problems with them, what some of the problems you’ve found with AI generated content have been, whether you’re using AI yourself to produce content and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Thanks for reading and if you wish to seek any of the titles I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk or amazon.com for all of your needs! Also feel free to follow my curator page on Steam “JRPG Reviews” for thoughts and opinions on any JRPGs that I play and my YouTube channel “Victory Achieved Gaming” where I guide my friend through challenging games.