Hey friend!

This week, we dive into the ever-evolving relationship between AI and content creation. 

AI technology is becoming more integrated into everyday platforms—case in point in today’s news roundup, LinkedIn and Meta. On the content side, this continues to fuel the ongoing question of how to distinguish expertise from misinformation. A new update from Google seems like a step toward answering, with a continued emphasis on E-E-A-T.

We’ll unpack all of that below!

–Thenuka

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What’s new in AI and content?

💼 LinkedIn may have trained AI models on your data

LinkedIn has surprised users by introducing a new data privacy setting to let it use user-generated content—all your posts, articles, and videos—to train its AI models by default. While users can opt out of this practice, the changes aren’t retroactive. In other words, any data already used for AI training can’t be reversed. Not great since LinkedIn had apparently already been training AI models on user data before updating its terms of service to reflect this. What’s the point of using your data? According to LinkedIn, it’s meant to improve tools that help people find jobs and learn new skills.

• What this means for you: If you’re in the U.S., you can opt out of having your data used for AI training in your Data Privacy settings. Those of you in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland are fortunately protected by stricter privacy regulations. 

♾️ Meta AI levels up its voice conversation and image options

Meta recently announced several updates to its AI products, including celebrity voices, photo-editing capabilities, and expanded business tools. If you so desire, you can now talk to Meta AI and hear voice responses à la Awkwafina, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key, Kristen Bell, and Judi Dench on Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. Additionally, you can ask Meta AI to analyze or edit photos and provide answers about them. “You can share a photo of a flower you see on a hike and ask Meta AI what kind of flower it is,” Meta gives as an example. “Or you can share a photo of a new dish you want to cook and ask Meta AI for instructions on how to make it.”

• What this means for you: AI-powered chatbots and voice conversations are nothing new. But as a social media giant, Meta’s participation in the AI space race could mean a big downstream SEO impact. The growing use of AI chatbots for everyday tasks like asking questions or finding recipes lines up with expert predictions that top-of-funnel queries will decline in the long run.

🔍 Google identifies content creators in its search results’ Knowledge Panels

Agency head Jason Barnard recently observed that Google is starting to label creators with a “Content Creator” subtitle in search results’ Knowledge Panel. This is yet another sign of Google’s shift toward prioritizing the E-E-A-T of content—that is, expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The idea here: the content source, aka the author or creator, speaks to a piece of content’s reputability.

• What this means for you: In line with other Google updates from the past few years, this change emphasizes the importance of recognizing not just the content itself, but the credibility and expertise of the creators behind it. To that end, Barnard advises optimizing any author profiles on your site and making their relationships with your content clear.

🤖 Make way for Molmo, the new kid on the AI block

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) has released Molmo, an open-source multimodal AI model family that rivals top proprietary models like OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini. To be clear, Molmo specializes in visual understanding—its demo video shows it analyzing photos in real time. However, its open-source nature and the fact it’s free is groundbreaking for making AI more accessible.  

• What this means for you: It’s worth paying attention to Molmo because it opens up new opportunities to leverage AI without the costs and restrictions of proprietary systems. Since Molmo is free and open-source, startups could potentially rely less on Google, OpenAI, and so on to create AI-powered apps and experiences. If that piques your interest, check out Molmo’s public demo.

Playbooks & Guides

🧑‍💻 How to leverage user-generated content to fuel your pSEO strategy

User-generated content (UGC) is a goldmine for pSEO. How so? Users create fresh content related to keywords that align with your brand—so when you merge it with pSEO, you get a self-sustaining ecosystem of relevant, authentic, and SEO-friendly content. Consider how Pinterest’s entire platform is built around users creating “Pins” or how G2’s product pages revolve around user ratings and reviews. Learn more about how to leverage UGC for pSEO by checking out our latest playbook.

>> Find out more