Artificial Intelligence (AI) has developed immensely in recent years and can now be used for a wide variety of purposes – including content creation. Tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Jasper have been developed to create text following a prompt, but what does that mean for content creators, and should you rely on new AI technologies for your business?
We explore the pros and cons of AI versus human content writers, and the ways that you can make use of AI in your marketing strategies.
How is AI used for Writing Content?
AI can be used to generate content ideas, automate content creation, or identify keywords. AI content tools work by scanning existing content and gathering the data needed based on the prompt provided by the user. Many will have been trained on a bank of data, meaning that in some cases, the information the AI is working from will be a few years old. It then processes this data and outputs new content from what it has learned. This can be completed in a matter of minutes, if not seconds.
One of the most popular examples of artificial intelligence that can produce written content is the Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT-3) and ChatGPT from OpenAI, which uses deep learning to generate text that sounds like human language. This is because it is learning from content that was previously written by a human content writer.
Let’s see what the ChatGPT AI says about Artificial Intelligence vs Content Writers:
Pros of Using AI for Content Writing
There are several benefits of using AI to assist with content writing.
Quickly Produces Text
Most importantly, it can create text in seconds, allowing you to produce more content in a short amount of time. This can make it more cost-effective.
Idea Generation
One of the best ways to use AI is as an idea generator. You could enter a prompt like ‘blog post ideas for a holiday cottage company’, and it will produce a list of ideas that can bring you some inspiration. It can be a handy tool for getting you out of writer’s block and developing a content strategy that works for your niche.
Cons of Using AI for Content Writing
However, there are also plenty of downsides to relying on AI for writing content.
Misses Important Context
AI may struggle to get key messaging details for your business right. When launching a new product or trying to provide your potential customers with important information, it is crucial that all of the details are correct, and messaging may be missed or jumbled if you rely on an AI over a human content writer.
AI writing takes from content that already exists online, so if you’re writing about something new or unique to your brand, it’s not going to be able to get everything right. Likewise, the information provided by the AI may need to be fact-checked for more niche industries.
Google’s Content Guidelines
Google wants unique, authoritative content that provides readers with the information that they need and has algorithms that can identify when content has been written by an AI. Recent updates to the Google algorithm have put a focus on penalising content written by AI, which could be detrimental to your site’s growth and visibility online.
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller stated: “if you’re using machine learning tools to generate your content, it’s essentially the same as if you’re just shuffling words around, or looking up synonyms, or doing the translation tricks that people used to do… for us it’s still against the Webmaster Guidelines. So we would consider that to be spam.”
Lack of a Human Touch
While AI text can sound close enough to being human (as it is adapted from work that humans have written!), there is often a lack of human touch evident in the copy produced. If you want to evoke a particular tone of voice in your text or incorporate more jokey language, the AI may struggle to get this right, while a professional human writer would not.
Also, as AI takes from existing content online, there is no way to develop new, original ideas in the writing, which you could achieve with a human writer.
AI Is Not Always Available
Freely available AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can only handle a certain number of requests at once, which may mean that it is not available to be used when you need them. When too many people are using it, you may get a notification like this showing that it is at capacity, and you may need to wait a while before you can use it.
There are AI writing tools that you can pay for, such as Jasper, which costs $984 for the year for 100,000 words generated. This would get you the equivalent of eight 1000-word blogs a month; however, this would be less if you needed to request changes to copy made.
As you can see, there are pros and cons to using AI for content writing. AI can make things quicker, but using it alone will lead to sacrificing the quality of the content, can have detrimental effects on your SEO and will lack a human feel that can connect with your audience.
However, that doesn’t mean we should completely reject AI – it is a useful tool and can benefit and complement a human content writer’s work by providing ideas, writing prompts and forming a starting point for writers to learn about a new industry or topic.