Stepping into a World in which Long-form Content no longer matters

Is long-form content becoming irrelevant?

People are apparently losing interest in reading posts, articles, and books. Instead, they prefer to read summaries generated by GPT and other similar bots. This leads us to question the value of long-form content such bots create, therefore hardly deserving our full attention.

The younger generation is losing patience, and the same transition from clips to shorts experienced by the video industry is now transforming written content.

Meaningful, interesting long-form textual content is hard to generate. This explains the immense excitement around the new generation of Generative AI capable of creating human-like pieces following a few guideline sentences. “Make an outline,” “convert bullets to paragraphs,” and the other prompting techniques capable of generating such content are mastered by an increasing number of people and soon will become standard practice.

We Still Have an Avid Reader: Google!

So if humans ignore long-form written content, is it useless? Not yet. There is one consistent reader, always wanting more textual input: Google’s army of scraping bots. SEO ranking is still determined mainly by the amount of “quality” keyword-intensive content. In fact, it is worse than ever — Google’s recent response to the numerous tricks trying to control ranking via dummy keywords, hacked links, etc., made content the no. 1 factor. So SEO experts were sent to search for content writers and make sure their creations included the correct amount of keywords.

Now it is all passing to ChatGPT and its siblings: “Write me an article on “X” using the following keywords… “ and it’s done. Google’s bots read the article, determine its “value,” keywords content, and voila! — ranking goes up.

So the expanded flow looks like this:

So the bots will be the only ones enjoying the long form.…

And we will keep consuming content in the form of yet another 3-sentence summary of the creation of some “well-known” writer (sorry: “prompt genius”).

Summary (Mine!)

Prompting instead of writing, consuming content as summaries rather than the original is rapidly becoming the norm for the busier part of the population, frequently considered the preferred target for products, services, and businesses in general. Those few who will escape this trend and will treat posts and books as worth their time will find around them people who never read or read distorted or misleading summaries. How that will affect humanity’s view of the world around us is too early to predict.

Summary (The ChatGPT One …)

The article suggests that people are losing interest in reading long-form content, instead preferring shorter summaries generated by bots like GPT. The younger generation’s decreasing patience and the shift towards shorter content, similar to what the video industry experienced, are driving this trend.

While long-form content may lose its appeal for humans, it is still valuable for SEO purposes. Google’s army of scraping bots values keyword-rich content, and SEO experts are now using bots like ChatGPT to generate such content easily. As a result, bots may become the only ones enjoying long-form content while people continue to consume short summaries.

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Not bad at all. Maybe it is still OK to live in a world of summaries…