Designing a Website with AI – I get it now
It’s done, I’ve understood, as usual, it is corporate greed that wins out. I am sure that if you read this article on AI and website design, you will in some way be able to apply it to your own industry, business, art or passion. The only part that disappoints me is how long it’s taken to get me here.
So – what’s the plan and why am I so despondent? What’s wrong with large multinational companies making money, paying their staff and abiding by all the laws of various governments in a safe working environment where mortgages and pensions are paid on time? The modern corporate world is Ok – right, it will look after us in the long term.
Already we’re seeing retribution when things go wrong, banks have to pay fines, refund money and basically, these mammoth companies have to use economies of scale to supply us, mere consumers, with the products we want at an affordable price, otherwise the whole thing will come tumbling down – Right?
So – back to the subject at hand, Google have promoted AI and Gemini since day one. Luddites like me had been saying all along, it’s all very well, but where’s the money? Why spend gazillions on AI when it’s all free? I can make music, write books, and complete dissertations in 19 seconds in AI.
In the meantime, we’re using up scarce water resources, destroying the planet and extracting every last watt or hertz of energy from our poor old planet. It cannot be good. We have heard it so many times before, yet we plunge on into the abyss – why, what’s in it for anyone? Will a robot really wipe my bottom in the future?
The answer is a resounding yes – and you’d better start believing it. But it’s going to cost us. We’re already paying with our Data, our Privacy, our Taxes and of course, far too often, our actual money. It’s a merry-go-round and there is no sign of it stopping or even abating.
The Prompt
I hear you ask – how does the money fit in? First up, we know the nature of finding what we want is changing. People are looking in more places than ever, on Google, in Social, on their TV’s. Advertising is the king of all business models ever known to mankind. It gets us exactly what we want when we want it. It’s the reason the Internet was built in the first place. No need to believe all that codswallop about building a better world. We were given the Internet for a princely sum of a broadband connection (it’s not actually free) so that we could be advertised to.
Watch a film, you probably want the dress or the car or the girl, for that matter, read the news, you probably aspire to be President (who couldn’t do a better job of it) or the King of England, catch up with your friends, well, never have the Joneses next door being so alluring to you.
So – you’re spending right, but then AI comes along, and again it’s all free, or low-cost – so you get onto it and power up your creativity and business acumen. And at the pinnacle of it all, you come up with more ways to advertise to other people, you get into Marketing.
Roll back one step… To do your marketing, you need a route to your audience. Yes, I am talking up websites, flashy posts and viral Videos. But now we hit a roadblock. Someone’s hit a button and pulled up a drawbridge. AI content is penalised. Yikes, who said that?
Any image on nano banana is watermarked, I am sure Music is as well. Google hunts down AI text or content to mark it down; it may be better written than this article, but it will rank lower. Suddenly, all 10 seconds of effort in promoting AI to write 8 blog posts in one prompt is meaningless. Google is never going to look at it.
Because everyone is using AI to spot the AI. My children used AI to write their essays and then the teachers used AI to mark the essays, leading to a ridiculous situation when it comes to genuine exam results.
AI content is market down unless…
Pay up
You pay for it. And therein lies the key to it all. How do you get your AI-generated content in front of your audience? You simply have to pay for it. It makes no difference if it’s a website you want to rank well on Google, or a song you want to hear on Spotify or a Video you want people to see on Instagram. Paying will genuinely get your hits, views and listens.
Where does the money go, well straight back to the people that gave us AI no less. We’re paying for it. Probably the US of A, and probably California, but that’s after we’ve used up our own Oil and Water resources in our own countries.
The most criminal part of this whole equation is what’s left over: those who cannot afford this. The real people with real ideas. The ones who might make a difference to all of it. Anyone can still publish whatever content they like on any platform they like. Just increasingly, no one will see it. Without a bit of money, it will go nowhere.
Yet – we still plunge ahead, thinking this is all such a wonderful idea. I wish, and it will not happen, we all spent a little more time thinking about what we lose, rather than what we gain from new tech. When Cars arrived on the scene, the horse population collapsed. Was that the horse’s fault? Was that intentional?. I saw a rather good David Mitchell/Rob Webb sketch about eating pigs… what would happen if we all saved the world and became vegetarians, there would be an uncontrolled mass murder of cows, sheep and pigs and their purpose to humanity would be null and void. It’s a form of logic we should consider more often.