Can A.I. write my content for me?
Perhaps, with a little help from human friends…
Life moves pretty fast, according to Ferris Bueller. If you don’t stop and look around, you’ll be replaced by the robot overlords. In the blink of an eye, artificial intelligence is everywhere. Doing everything. It’s resurrecting Frank Sinatra to cover Ice Cube and the Notorious B.I.G. A.I. has created a lot of fear and anxiety that many of us may have outlived our professional usefulness—fears that are compounded by businesses, brands, and bosses who’d love to trim their labor expenses.
Those fears cut deep with writers, specifically the shapers of written digital content for the web and social media. And in many cases those fears are founded. Copy and content writing jobs are in decline and A.I. get better every day. But is it truly the apocalypse for human wordsmiths? If I’m a marketing exec, or a small business, can I cut that ‘content creator’ cost by logging into ChatGPT or BARD and asking for 1000 word post about brake pads?
Not entirely, or maybe it’s more appropriate to say not yet. Why? Well, first and foremost, because time is money. And if you were hiring a content or copywriter in the first place, it’s safe to assume you were doing so to save time. And second, it’s because A.I. just isn’t there yet—at least not without a human curator.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
AI content generators like ChatGPT and BARD are useful tools, but not a complete solution
You’ll rank better in search engines (SEO) with a human writer involved
Human guided content will be more meaningful and valuable to your audience
You will ultimately save time and money by working with a writer who understands how to prompt the A.I., and also how to write, edit, and reshape A.I. assisted content into content that is specific and useful
So what takes so much time?
Readability.
AI blog or content writers frequently spit out content that is difficult to read. In some tests, the reading difficulty was 200% harder than the average readers literacy. That means less engagement and less comprehension for your audience or potential customers. Kind of the opposite of what you’re going for.
Getting What You Want
AI writers also continuously come up short on requested word counts, lack specificity, and need repetitive inputs and prompts to create meaningful content. So instead of taking time to write, or spending a small part of our marketing budget on a writer, we are now taking similar or greater amounts of time to teach ourselves how to talk to the A.I, then teach the A.I. how to write something we want—that ultimately we’re going to have to edit anyway.
Shorter articles and generic information are detrimental to search engine optimization (SEO) and often penalized by Google. Google has made a push toward legible, useful content that isn’t a hodgepodge of keywords.
Additionally, search engines are continually using their own AI to search and summarize content. You’ve probably seen this already. What this means for the written social and digital content is that writing needs to be specific, useful, and come from a reputable source. If your content has this kind of depth, not only will it help you rank in search, it can feed into those A.I. summaries and link directly to your post.
So while there is certainly room for AI generated content to succeed—as there should be—there’s a clear need for human filtration to better serve the human end user.
This is a good thing, not just for the writers, but for growing your business, or your followers.
Why Are Humans Valuable to A.I. Content Generation?
A.I. doesn’t buy our products, services, or subscribe to our YouTube channel. Well, it may sometimes do the last one but it’s not what you’re looking for. You’re trying to connect with human audiences, users, and potential customers. You need someone who is empathetic to what brings value to that audience, and that’s your writer.
AI opens great opportunities for both content writers and your content. AI can speed up the research process, it can help research SEO keywords, and AI can provide a great starting point to speed up the delivery of your article, tweet, or blog post. AI tools already do a ton help writers write, which should help save you money, and increase the writer’s productivity.
Digital content writers and their clients should embrace A.I. tools to maximize their output, provide value to their audience, and move seamlessly into our ever-changing future.