Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the talk of the town. Sometimes seen as the savior of humanity, sometimes as the cause of all our ills, it's time to face the facts: AI has become indispensable, not only in our short-, medium- and long-term forecasts, but in our day-to-day lives. In the web industry, and therefore in our e-commerce agency ecosystem, the potential uses of AI are numerous, with their share of benefits and risks. Let's take a look.
CHATGPT, A PUBLICITY STUNT
First of all, it's important to remember that AI didn't just appear in 2023. The launch of free tools such as ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has had a magnifying glass effect on a technology that has already been in full development for a decade. AI is already part of our daily lives, with personal assistants such as Siri or Alexa, certain surveillance systems, diagnostic tools in the healthcare sector, and transaction monitoring and fraud detection in the financial sector. At Soledis, as in other e-commerce agenciesWe've already been testing AI for several years on various applications.
IA, ASSISTANT COPYWRITER IN SEO E-COMMERCE AGENCY
Soledis is an e-commerce agency with a dedicated webmarketingFor several years now, we've been testing AI on a variety of tasks to improve the visibility of our customers' websites.
Content writing is an essential part of natural search engine optimization (SEO), that AI is already playing a significant role. The time saved on copywriting, proofreading, rewording and SEO optimization is considerable, despite the occasional haphazard formulation by AIs, and provided the subject is clearly defined.
But what will the web look like when all its content is written by AIs?
"Yesterday, all content creation on a website required human time. The sites with the best search engine rankings were those that invested the most in content creation. Today, with AI, this time constraint tends to disappear. As a result, the web is likely to be flooded with AI-generated content. Faced with an exponential quantity of content of equal quality, search engines are bound to review their referencing criteria. Today, we're in the early stages of this revolution. We're just trying to detect AI-generated content, and wondering whether or not it should be flagged. But the problem goes deeper: if the web is our common knowledge base on a human scale, should we let AI write most of the content?"
Olwenn, webmarketing expert
Does Google penalize AI-generated content?
In this article from February 2023, Google explains that it will not penalize AI-generated content, but will continue to penalize poor-quality content. So it's worth asking what the criteria are for assessing good quality content. The SEO expert blog abondance recalls them in this article April 2023 article Experience, Expertise, Authority, Reliability (E-E-A-T). However, several experiments have shown that AI is not up to the task in terms of content quality.
- In 2021, researchers used artificial intelligence to generate news articles and then asked human judges to rate the quality of these articles against those written by professional journalists. The results showed that the human-written articles were judged to be of higher quality. ("Comparing the quality of Journalism created through AI and Traditional methods" by S. Karaman, K, Hartley, J. Bridges, T. Baker, S. Zhang, H. Yang, M. Potts and D.A. McDonald. Study published in the proceedings of the Association pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles - ACL).
- Thomas Leonetti, SEO expert & Data Analyst, compared the organic referencing of texts written by AI and humans on the same semantic cocoon (study details here). Its conclusion is twofold: texts written by humans are of higher quality and have much better SEO. So it would seem that, one way or another, search engines are penalizing AI-driven copywriting. Its syntactic and grammatical frameworks, easily recognized by Google, penalize AI when it comes to SEO.
- As part of her final year dissertation, one of her students tested the create a Woocommerce online store in 2 days and for less than 20€.. His exercise highlighted the same AI limitation: it was in content creation that the AI lacked creativity and penalized his store's SEO. "The recurrence of wording and paragraph layout can be felt quite quickly. [...] Given that the AI is based on global knowledge available on the web, the content generated can quickly resemble each other. [...] The tool tends to use the same logical connectors (Moreover, however, in addition, first of all...), which is often the element that betrays the use of AI."
IA, ASSISTANT GRAPHIC & WEB DESIGNER FOR E-COMMERCE AGENCIES
Any e-commerce agency like Soledis is already using AI in graphic design. Numerous AI tools have emerged for the creation or correction of visuals: Craiyon, Midjourney, Dall-e, ACreative ai... We can quickly and quite satisfactorily generate graphics, logos, advertising banners, photo montages but also resize images, retouch photos, create graphic variants or even get the graphic trends of a market. All these time-consuming, specialized and uncreative tasks can be automated thanks to AI, and this represents a major time-saver.
And we're not yet talking about the personalization of visuals according to the visitor to a web page, image library management, web design project management, user behavior analysis to optimize a site's Ux, which are the next applications of AI in graphic and web design.
Graphic and web designers will soon be able to have a creative 100% job. AI will assist them in their realization. And that's another time-saver and added value for an e-commerce agency.
IA, ASSISTANT PROGRAMMER IN A WEB DEVELOPMENT AGENCY
In programming, and therefore in website creation, AI can be used by web developers to automate repetitive tasks: writing code or detecting errors in existing code. The developer must describe the expected functionalities in detail to achieve optimal results. The time saved thanks to AI is phenomenal, and it's not a shortcut that reduces quality! Developers can therefore concentrate on more complex and less repetitive tasks, while improving the quality of their work. AI makes it possible to avoid human errors and deliver consistent work.
"Today, as with any web development company, our aim is to deliver the highest possible quality work in the shortest possible time. AI obviously has a big part to play in helping us achieve this. If we use it correctly, we'll reduce the time we spend writing code, while also reducing our margin for error! On the other hand, what we won't be reducing is the level of qualification of our developers and the number of developers. Indeed, in the next few years, when the use of AI will be equivalent in all e-commerce agencies, what will make the difference will be the human added value: specification writing, R&D, optimization of prompt writing, customer relations, etc."
Jérôme, Head of the Soledis development studio
A study conducted by Facebook AI Research in January 2022 goes in the same direction. Researchers generated Python code with artificial intelligence and asked human developers to rate the quality of the generated code. The code was found to be functional, but of inferior quality to code written by human developers.
The student who created an online store in 2 days for less than €20 was also limited in development, and her experience clearly demonstrates the added value of the human element in an e-commerce agency: understanding the customer's needs and reformulating them in technical terms, knowledge of the CMS and modules on the market, configuration and parameterization of modules, specific developments.
In conclusion, AI offers very promising prospects for saving time and therefore productivity for any e-commerce agency. Read on to find out how Soledis is taking advantage of this booming technology.
