Why AI Isn’t Quite Ready to Be Your Content Writer

AI seems to be everywhere today in Chicago. MidJourney and its cousins are creating art. Others are composing their own music. Even writing, long thought to be one of the most human of endeavors, seems to be moving into the province of artificial intelligence with ChatGPT, Bard, and others churning out everything from high school essays to blog posts.

Don’t think that AI is the ideal content writer, though. For all its impressive advancements, these algorithms still suffer from a wide range of problems that mean they’re pretty far from being ready to be your content writer. What sorts of problems?

Quality – Because AI relies on training data to create content, it’s easy to miss your intended tone and often includes bias. That means your content is likely to miss the mark with your audience, which at best requires you to go through the content creation process again with a human writer. At worst it leads to brand damage.

Plagiarism – AI does not think for itself, nor can it create new things. From Dall-E to MidJourney to ChatGPT, everything AI does is sort of a mishmash of existing content. Often, that means leaving recognizable chunks of the source material and resulting in plagiarism. At best, that’s embarrassing. At worst, it’s illegal. In all cases, it goes against Google’s best practices and will affect your position in the SERPs.

Lack of Value – Speaking of Google, the search giant has already taken a stand against AI-generated content with its 2022 update. Google rewards “helpful content written by people, for people”, and downgrades content written primarily for SEO purposes. Because AI focuses on SEO first and has no true understanding of the content being produced, it lacks value to human readers and will negatively affect your rankings.

Lack of Creativity – Anyone who has read AI content has noticed something peculiar. The content is iterative. It lacks creativity and originality. That’s because, for all its advancements, AI cannot create anything new. It just mixes up existing content. It also lacks emotional intelligence, meaning that the content is often tone-deaf and one-dimensional.

Is AI a powerful tool? Yes, it is. Does it have a lot to offer humans? Of course. Is it ready to be your content writer? Not be a long shot.

AI is best used as an aide to human content writers, allowing them to create deeper, more evocative content that resonates with audiences and builds brand strength.