Overview of ChatGPT And AI For MSPs

This is the overview of ChatGPT specifically targeted at MSPs who want to use it for technical documentation, however I want to really discuss something that many no doubt are thinking of doing and that is use ChatGPT to write their own articles or autonomously create technical documentation.

There are few times in history where technology has moved forward at such a rapid pace. With the advent of AI which often feels like magic, it is hard not to get a bit carried away with it.

It is easy to think that AI in general is pretty much going to impact the world much the same way the USB connector or desktop PC itself & I think in general, that is a correct view, especially considering we are right at the start of this & the improvement curve is so steep already.

While I have used Artificial intelligence offline to assist with an MSP documentation framework with which I write documentation, I attempted to use it to write public facing articles on a range of technology focused topics and it has been an unmitigated disaster. 

I spend about 3 hours per article and get maybe 2 articles completed per day if I am lucky. I suspect I will have replaced all AI articles with human written content within 4 months but it is a slow process.

I am keeping the pages there because one thing AI does really well is the ability to help me structure. The pages all exist which means as I link from one page to another, that page is easily linked too. It is like the chicken and the egg in this manner in that I could take them all offline however I would then no longer be able to link to them.

So far keeping them up does not seem to cause any issues and whenever I re-submit an article, they are both re-indexed and served on Google within a few hours.

I have completed a single category which is the MSP Backup category so if that floats your boat then it is the one category I guarantee has 100% human written content.

I am going to discuss my experience with ChatGPT and how my view or perception of it went from basically a type of magic to now 6 months later thinking that while it is great for certain specific tasks, ChatGPT articles are complete junk that insults the intelligence of people such as yourself that have taken time out of their day to read an article that they believe has unique content where at the end, there is a feeling that something has been gained from reading it.

Agree or disagree, a human written article will make you think about whatever subject you are reading about and come out of it the other side better than you went in.

AI Images

While I am eliminating, albeit slowly, every AI written article on my site, I have used AI to create images you see here. I did that for several reasons. 

First I do not think they are all that important because most people come here to help solve an issue or understand a particular problem to do with service provider documentation management, the pictures are just there to break up the text into manageable chunks.

Secondly, I am not the world's most creative individual, I know enough about Photoshop and Indesign to just get by and AI does a better job than I could ever do creating images.

Third, I do not want to use copyrighted images or other peoples material here and so having AI create the images eliminates the risk of using other people's material.

Finally, I am a huge fan of the gaudy dripping psychedelic look of the images on here and I could never replicate them on my own. 

In summary you will find over 95% of my images are created with AI tools (Except screenshots) however I can take credit for resizing and cropping the images as well as changing them over to the newer web image format and that has to count for something don’t you think?

AI Impact On Managed Service Providers

Like any new tool though, it is just a tool to make things easier. Ask yourself, what does AI need to be able to function?

It needs input from humans, without that, it fails to be useful for anything beyond interpreting history. It still needs ongoing unique content from human beings to be able to appear as if it has all the answers.

If humans stopped uploading unique content built on our individual experience then cloud based AI is incapable of generating new worthwhile and unique content that we can learn from.

Creation Of My Website

This site you are reading is less than 6 months old at the time of writing this article and I spent the first 3 weeks designing a mother beautiful spreadsheet with all of the keywords I wanted to use along with variation of terms etc. 

Then after creating the perfect AI prompt that I believed would encapsulate my experience and demonstrate I am the guru of MSP documentation, I instructed ChatGPT to write 300 articles on various MSP topics of interest.

I wrote those 300 articles while watching Youtube, I didn't even really read what it was writing. On the surface it appeared to be doing a better job of writing than I ever could. 

After all, I have always struggled with the creativity required to write well and I am embarrassed at the amount of times I tend to just stare at a screen for extended periods of time.

So I created these 300 articles and uploaded them to my site eagerly submitting them in batches of about 20 a day already patting myself on the back. Guess what Google did?

It indexed the lot and my article impressions quickly shot up to about 600 a day and thought I had hit the big time.

Within a short time frame however, the impressions on Google had dropped like a stone, from 600 down to around 100 per day. Why could that have been?

Take a look at the image below, it demonstrates how early on, most of my pages were indexed initially yet as time went on they gradually de-indexed before I rewrote them causing them to be reindexed in a very short amount of time.

AI Versus Google Search Engine

It is likely it is going to supersede Google as far as search tools though./span>

Somewhere along the line, Google went from a very useful tool to being just a popularity contest where the large corporations automatically receive the highest vote from Google even if the content they spew up on the first few pages is not relevant in any way to what you are looking for. ChatGPT for instance appears far more impartial to the information it delivers.

Look at any halfway popular search term and you find yourself having to wade through the first 40 results that have almost no relevance to what you are searching for to get the answers you want.

I just hope the new Google Bard tool does not put a stranglehold on ChatGPT and start delivering non relevant information that steers us towards information engineered by the top corporations.

Google Diversification

Still, Google has diversified so much that the search engine itself could disappear and they will continue to maintain their dominance. They probably saw the AI revolution before many of us.

As a tool for documentation though, it is both extremely promising in eliminating some of the more mundane areas required in a successful documentation framework deployment.

Artificial Intelligence Writes Superficial Junk

When I first started creating articles using AI, I noticed on the surface it would come across as impressive throwing words like “Crucial” “Delve In” and “critical” . It was awesome, I legitimately thought it was the closest to magic I had come across.

I am fairly new to creating a blog and I was just expecting the numbers to continue to go through the roof and when they didn’t, I thought perhaps I better have a quick read of the articles just to make sure they were of adequate quality….

Take a look at the image that shows how I got an initial boost before my articles' impressions just fell away.

The image below is a zoom in on the image above showing more detail. The time frame is over 5 months and as you can see all documents were initally indexed before quickly falling away. This is a direct result of rewriting AI generated documentation

I am not sure if in your life you have come across something so confronting that you cannot absorb it all at once so you say to yourself “it's not that bad” while deep down knowing it is?

Well that is how I handled things, I read a few backup articles and thought I could just edit them to make them more useful and readable. Gradually over a period of a week or so and having adjusted a few, I realized that every part of the articles were trash and most of the time after reading 1500 words I would get to the end and think “What did I just read?”

Articles Need To Be Useful

AI can create 1500 word articles in less than a minute but they are awful and not only does AI needlessly take 20 words to say something that only needs 5, it repeats the same phrases over and over again.

Google as it turns out just like AI cannot actually read an article, it cannot give it a Doug score but as it turns out, it doesn’t need to. If you upload junk then people will read a couple of sentences and back out of the page. Google then uses those analytics to determine if the content is worthwhile.

Turns out, it is the single most important part of creating web content, it has to be useful to the reader, who would have thought?

Chat gpt is not going to implement a successful flexible asset framework though, it's not going to put in a consistent password naming convention and ensure it remains relevant. If you asked it to configure and integrate your various systems, you will be very disappointed.

There is a long list of important tasks that AI as a tool is not capable of undertaking. As history teaches us, it will enable us to do more in less time and somewhere along the way, we will look back and find we will be working harder on more complex tasks than we ever did before.

Articles That Are Of No Use

Over half of my articles created with ChatGPT are still indexed with Google and still bring in a little traffic, however the reason Google is de-indexing these pages is because they are of no use to readers. 

They do not add anything useful to any conversation, they just regurgitate information that is already out there in a way that most often makes little sense at all. 

New Article Writing Strategy

When I started down this path, I was hyper defensive regarding anyone telling me that articles written with AI are a waste of time because it meant having to confront the fact I had not suddenly discovered a path of fast money and no effort, something I have always been unsuccessful at. I am almost starting to believe that anything worthwhile requires effort which admittedly is a bit of a bummer. There is no market for the bathwater of middle aged men unfortunately.

Now like a reformed smoker, I am ecstatic that ChatGPT and others like it cannot take the place of human writers. The very fact it makes it so easy to write an article means the bar is lowered so that everyone can participate even non english writers and that is actually a bad thing.

Because AI writes articles so poorly it means that people are going to get sick to death pretty quickly of AI generated content unless it is something of utility such as AI written powershell scripts. Every man and his dog is currently doing it and that just makes human written content even more valuable.

The Future Of AI

AI is here and right now is the worst it is going to ever be, it will only ever improve from this point forward. I cannot see it taking away writers especially in specialized fields like MSP information management and deduplication. We currently live in a time with the best of both worlds where we can use AI to undertake the mundane stuff.

For instance, I have a local trained copy that I use to help write technical documentation. It is currently far from perfect and the mistakes it makes often mean it is actually easier to do something manually.

It cannot take the place of MSP documentation specialists and I cannot see it ever doing that or at least not in the near future. You will still need staff expertise to write the documentation however what it does do is forces technically competent staff to work within a framework of documentation rules and that does help.

It helps a great deal in areas where previously I had failed which is enforcing consistency over a long time frame.

Should Search Engines Ban AI Content?

I do not think they should. I think they are doing it right in this department. An article should not be penalized just because of the way it was created. If someone is able to create a useful article that people benefit from then who cares how it was created?

By evaluating the usefulness the article brings to readers is the best way to evaluate an article, it keeps the playing field level. I am actually really thankful that as things stand, AI is not capable of writing a helpful article because it means the effort I am putting in here is not wasted.

AI Strengths

It sounds as if I hate AI however I love AI and I use it for what it is good at and that for me is overcoming creative blocks and giving me ideas.

I do use it for those circumstances where I need to extract my expertise onto the screen, so for example, I might have 5 good reasons why Managed service providers should consider using a 3rd party vendor to undertake their documentation refresh project and it will prompt me for another 5 or 10 reasons. Most will be irrelevant but I may find a gold nugget in amongst them.

AI Consistency

Several areas that make AI appear so human yet also are big disadvantages when it comes to having an effective & competitive documentation framework is first, how terrible it handles consistency.

It is randomly and constantly inconsistent. You could say that is a type of consistency I suppose however as an example, give it an identical prompt across say 5 technical documents for something as simple as using H2 Headings for each section heading.

It will do exactly as you ask it for 2 of those documents and then ignore your prompt for the remaining 3. You then ask it 15 different ways for headings that you know work while it apologizes for its mistake and yet fails to correct it.

Leave it a day, put in the original prompt in the same chat and watch as it follows it to a tee.

English Remains A Niche Expertise

Just think for a moment if AI could write an article better than a human, not just the flowery rubbish it spews out at the moment, actual in depth quality content that is not dated and on technical topics from computer hardware to backup as a service solutions, it would mean that near enough to 8 billion people just need a computer terminal to be able to write great technical content at high speed, people who have zero technical knowledge, zero English writing skills who will ultimately flood the internet with articles no different from mine or yours.

There are currently around 500 million english speaking individuals on the planet, of those lets say a quarter have some type of technical skill they could write about. Take that down to a specific expertise such as what I do which is tech documentations strategies, what maybe a million people?

Then take that million people and eliminate those who either are not in the situation to write or do not want to write and there are probably a couple hundred thousand worldwide who either have the desire to write articles on the topic.

So I am extremely thankful that there are not 8 billion potential content creators delivering the same or better content than me on anything from disaster recovery articles to cybersecurity because if that ever happens and I am unable to differentiate my articles on say virtualization from them then it would become a pointless exercise.

Sense Of Achievement

It may take me 3 hours or so to complete a single article going off of the 60 or so storage based articles I have so far rewritten.

Sure my dreams of life in the fast lane with piles of cash and ladies of low morale fiber are over. I can take comfort in the sense of achievement I get everytime I complete an article.

I did feel slight shame and zero achievement having AI create my articles for me. It just felt as hollow as anyone reading them would have felt. I may have spelling mistakes, possibly ramble more than I should and people may get to the end of my articles and dislike me because of the way I write.

They will not feel empty though and that is important to me.

Conclusion

Thankfully AI is terrible at writing articles especially on complex subjects such as IT and business consulting subjects where the goal is to learn something new. It seems to create what I consider the junk food of the article world. If words are calories then it stuffs articles full of calories and on completion of reading you are left feeling unsatisfied and slightly ashamed.

Google does not read articles, it cannot tell a good one from a bad one however what it can do is detect how fast people leave and so if you deliver junk via AI then people will leave almost immediately. When that happens, it is a strong indicator that your article is not worthwhile to google and will likely not be served in the search results and after a while will be de-indexed.

AI is an excellent tool for certain tasks such as implementing a documentation framework within an MSP or creating structure as well as helping with the block that comes when writing an article but it will not take the place of a human being for the foreseeable future.

We have a number of other ChatGPT and AI related articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/chatgpt/chatgpt-index-page-01

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