HUMN-1: Building Trust for Small Blogs in the AI Era

As time passes, you’ve noticed it’s becoming increasingly difficult for small-time bloggers like yourself to compete with the rapidly growing number of AI-written blogs.

A valid concern is that these fully AI-generated blogs often provide readers with inaccurate content. This erodes web users’ trust in search engine results, affecting small and new blogs the most.

If this AI wildwest continues, is there a chance for you as a small-time blogger to still stand out?

Let’s explore.

The Trust Issue With Small Blogs

The main problem with small blogs is that everything is small – the budget and the team. Most of us have the determination and wish to make the blog happen, but it is getting harder to stand out.

As generative AI hit the market a few years back, many opportunists jumped at the chance to create endless amounts of content as cheaply and quickly as possible – offering no real value to the readers.

Next to the generic, spinned low value content, AI content suffers also from something known as AI hallucination – meaning that the facts in the text might be completely false, and made up. Depending on the AI used, this could be anywhere as much as 27% of the time.

Larger blogs and sites were less affected by the AI content shift due to their loyal readership. To maintain trustworthiness and distinguish themselves from AI-generated content, many implemented fact-checking measures. They often list a fact-checker’s name alongside the author’s, demonstrating a commitment to accuracy and transparency.

For small blogs, this has not been viable, as implementing two-person fact checking is also something that requires extra money.

How Small Blogs Can Indicate Trustworthiness

So there must be an option for smaller blogs to show that they are a trustworthy source?

You bet.

Let’s break down the problem into simpler terms:

• AIs tend to hallucinate and offer low-value content.
• We as small bloggers don’t have the budget to implement credible fact-checking.

Meet HUMN-1 by Winston AI, launched in August 2024.

In fancy terms HUMN-1 is the first human content certification for websites and blogs. In simple terms, it scans your website automatically for AI content, and if it deems no or minimal AI was used, you get a trust badge.

This trust badge indicates to the reader that the content is created by yourself, and thus is probably heavily fact-checked as you dedicated the time to write the piece in the first place.

HUMN-1 can be implemented on any website, and they even have a plugin for those who love to use WordPress. Winston AI claims that this audit process can be done in minutes, and with minimal cost.

Winston AI also claims that having the HUMN-1 badge on your website next to your articles can help you:

• Foster trust with your audience. We can see the logic behind this one, however, there needs to be a larger push to educate readers about such trust badges.
• Send a positive signal to Search Engines. Until proven, this remains a marketing gimmick, and shouldn’t be taken very seriously.
• Outrank your competitors. In terms of SEO, we don’t think this is true. However, if such initiatives gain traction, and Google might start valuing such badges, this could be the case in the future.

So we can conclude that HUMN-1 is currently rather a novelty that you can have on your site.

However, if you take educating your readers about HUMN-1 into your own hands, and your blog covers an area that is very fact-sensitive, we see no reason why HUMN-1 can’t help your small blog to grow.

What We Have Noticed About HUMN-1

However, what we were most interested in is how the uptake of HUMN-1 has been so far, and on what blogs these badges have been implemented.

For this, we reached out to Amelia Grace from Winston AI to get a bit more clarification – yet we did not get any answers regarding this. 

This could be due to customer privacy, as they’re not obliged to reveal users. We investigated further since we haven’t seen any websites with the badge, likely because this tool is very new.

For the WordPress plugin, the WordPress website reveals that there are currently less than 10 pages where the HUMN-1 plugin is active.

We don’t think it’s because it’s a bad product or that it doesn’t work, as all Winston AI products are pretty solid. It’s simply the fact that this is a very new tool, and people are still unaware of it.

On the flip-side, we’ve noticed that access to the service is really easy. The certification is available for any Winston AI Advanced and Elite subscriptions. You can also simply purchase the HUMN-1 certification separately.

So in our opinion, anyone vaguely interested should give it a go. And we are happy to shine a bit of light on this product.

Conclusion

In conclusion, HUMN-1 offers blogs a potential way to stand out in the sea of AI-generated content. 

While still new and not widely adopted, it provides an accessible method to certify human-created content. For small blog owners facing the challenges of establishing trust in today’s digital landscape, HUMN-1 may be worth exploring.

We’d love to hear about your experiences. Please share them at info@detectortools.com. We’ll update this post as soon as we receive meaningful, identifiable user experiences. 

Good luck!