The Future of Content Writing and AI

Any kind of innovation is exciting, but it also tends to deeply unnerve those in the industries being revolutionized. AI is the latest landmark technology to bring about sweeping changes in businesses around the world, and digital marketing experts are about as scared as they’ve been since the Industrial Revolution.

So, how do our content writers feel about content writing AI? Are we filled with excitement at the prospect of new AI writing tools, or do we fear for our livelihoods?

The answer is somewhat complex, but we definitely don’t think we’ll be replaced by robots anytime soon. If anything, these AI tools help us deliver more high-level, complex work for our clients. While AI writers may fit into a larger search engine marketing strategy, they alone do not make success, and we’ll tell you why. 

Can I use AI for content writing?

While publishing massive amounts of AI-authored content can alienate your audience and the search engines, which have become adept at picking out AI-generated content and putting it at the bottom of the pile, not utilizing AI to help generate your content can also put you at a massive disadvantage. 

To put it another way, yes, you should absolutely use AI tools for writing your content, but you need to be careful about how you leverage them. In its simplest terms, our ethos is this: you should not use AI to replace human authorship but as a tool to augment it. 

You want your content to remain high-quality because both humans and search algorithms prioritize content that is high-quality and informative. To keep the quality of your content high, you want to think about the strengths of AI writing tools and the strengths of your human writers and try to get them to work in harmony. 

As we see it, the most important strengths and weaknesses of AI writing tools are these:

• What machine learning can do better than a human: Intake massive amounts of information, recognize patterns, and apply conditions to those data sets.
• What machine learning cannot do better than a human: Fully inhabit a brand’s voice, take into account brand strategy, fact-check critical information, and write timely or non-evergreen content.

So, because machine learning can help you analyze massive amounts of information but can only produce human-like and not truly human content, we usually use AI writing tools to help us research, ideate, and improve our strategies. 

Continue reading about the do‘s and don‘ts of AI and digital marketing

Is AI going to replace content writers?

This is the million-dollar question, but for now, the million-dollar answer is “no.” Every new technology has skeptics who believe that its appearance heralds the end of days, and yet the world has yet to end. AI cannot replace content writers because writing of any kind is as much an art as it is a science, and no matter how much a machine learns, it will never develop a human’s level of creativity or sensitivity

The more likely scenario is that AI will continue to augment the capabilities of content writers, allowing them to focus on higher-level tasks while leveraging AI for repetitive or data-driven content generation.

Also, we should reiterate that Google’s algorithm considers much AI-generated content unhelpful, which can lead to bad SEO. Publishing solely-AI-authored content is strategically unsound for a couple of reasons:

1. Individual pieces may have a hard time ranking, and real humans likely still have to put time and attention into their creations.
2. Publishing obviously AI-generated content can be catastrophic for your entire brand, as it can tank your website’s authority score and push down the ranking of any higher-quality, human-generated content on your site. 

Beyond that, people can just tell when something is AI-authored, and we’ll show you how.

How do you tell when content was written by an AI writer?

Can you tell if the content was written by an AI writer? While tools that purport to tell you whether or not a piece of content is AI-generated are incredibly unreliable, there are a number of ways to tell AI- and human-authored content apart. 

1. AI content tends to repeat itself and state the obvious.
2. AI-generated content is usually overly formal, and its tone of voice is often flat.
3. AI datasets will inevitably have old information, which means AI tools often make mistakes.
4. AI writers will continue to generalize regionally, even if you tell it your specific location.
5. Machines don’t have a sense of storytelling, and they don’t understand how to be persuasive. If a piece of content feels like it’s just listing off facts, there’s a chance it is not human-generated.
6. Instead of writing strong calls to action, AI writers tend to underline the importance of understanding a subject. They will never suggest that your audience hire you or buy your product, but only that they “understand the intricacies of a subject.”
7. If all else fails, AI has a list of words and phrases that it almost always uses, including the following:
   1. “Navigating”
   2. “Landscape”
   3. “Complexities” or “intricacies”
   4. “Delve”
   5. “In the world of” or “in the realm of”
   6. “Crucial,” ”vital,” or “paramount”

This doesn’t mean that if a piece of content has some of the attributes above, it was 100% AI-generated, but if you notice that a piece of content has a few of them, it does mean that you can start getting suspicious. 

Let’s play AI-written bingo to see how many of the attributes we just mentioned are present when we ask a popular AI writing tool to “write a blog about marketing in Texas.”

Looks like we’re 7 for 7. 

While you can’t rely on AI tools to author your content without human oversight, your writers can use these same AI tools to save themselves time on repetitive tasks and improve the overall quality of their content. Before we talk about how that’s done, we’re going to take a look at some of the AI writing tools we’re talking about. 

What is the AI writer everyone is using?

Is there a free AI tool to write content? There are a lot of free and paid AI writing tools available on the market, and more are appearing every day. Some of the more popular tools on the market include the following. 

AI writing tool	Summary
Jasper	Jasper is rapidly becoming one of the most popular AI tools in the industry, thanks to its enterprise-level memberships and large suite of tools. With Jasper, you’ll find integrated chatbots, project management tools, workflows, and analytics, making it a better fit for teams of marketers than for one individual.
Copy.ai	Similar to Jasper, with a less robust suite of tools for enterprise-level accounts, http://Copy.ai specializes in writing short-form content and social media posts.
Writer	Writer is a great option for people who, for whatever reason, want to avoid using Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models. Writer allows you to view copies of your content’s dataset, which means concerns around copyrighted material and accuracy may be assuaged for your organization.
SEOwind	SEOWind is an AI tool just for SEO. It uses AI to help you build out research briefs for search-optimized content but will not author the content itself. SEOWind is most powerful when paired with another AI writing tool.
ChatGPT	ChatGPT may have been the first to make it big on the consumer market, but it is the most general and one of the most limited, AI tools. Prompt refinement and trial and error are essential to getting what you need out of ChatGPT.
Grammarly	Useful as an editor, Grammarly makes spelling and grammar suggestions beyond your word processor’s normal spell-check abilities.

 

The tools that work best for you will depend on the needs of your organization and the strengths of the writers authoring your content. While we can’t tell you which AI tools will solve all of your problems, we can share how the writers at Baal & Spots use AI tools to improve content and provide value to our clients. 

How the writers at Baal & Spots leverage AI writing tools to augment their human-authored content

Chloe Kingston, Senior Content Specialist

“AI writing tools are a great way to make sure you’re doing your homework when putting together research for content. While AI writers will never be able to capture the unique perspective or voice of any of our clients as well as our human content writers can, they can lead us in the right direction for topic research, pull data for SEO strategy, and make sure the final product is well-optimized and up to our and our client’s standards.

Funny story: one time, I was testing out an AI tool to see how it would perform. I gave it a prompt to write about the necessity of a client’s product, and for some reason, it wrote the entire blog using pirate analogies. I don’t know where it got that from, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t entertained.”

Levi Dunning, Senior Content Specialist

“I was admittedly slow to accept the absolute necessity of using AI writing tools to help in the content creation process. I still never use a copy written by AI, but there are plenty of ways the AI tools help make my process more in-depth and help me get a lot more out of my time. 

At every stage in the lifecycle of a piece of content, there is room to let content writing AI plus up your work. I use it to do competitor research, to tell me why a piece of content can be improved, to help outline long-form content, and to gather information on what high-ranking pieces on any given topic have in common. Basically, it’s made the research process smoother and has allowed me to do more in-depth research quicker.”

Jordan Grimmer, Senior Content Specialist

“From a content strategy perspective, there are countless applications for AI tools, and even the simplest tools can yield powerful results if you know how to use them. 

For instance, I can use a simple chatbot to synthesize complex information. Because AI tools have immediate and comprehensive access to things like medical and legal dictionaries and language, they can help synthesize that information into layman’s terms — not just for my own understanding, but to provide a product that adds more value for its audience.”

Content writing AI is changing the way the game is played. Make sure you stay competitive with Baal & Spots. 

We haven’t seen the last of the innovations (or the disturbances) of content writing AI, but we know that human knowledge of content marketing, as well as an intimate familiarity with our clients’ brands, will never be automated. 

Our content writers love AI writing tools—but they also know their limitations. For us, AI writers are just like any other piece of technology: a tool that helps us take our game to the next level. They help us conduct deeper research, analyze data, and keep an eye on the competition, but they never speak for us or our clients. 

If you’re curious about how AI can level up your content marketing strategy, let’s talk. Whether you’re looking for a digital marketing partner to help your brand thrive online or are in need of professional website management services, Baal & Spots is always here to help ambitious brands thrive.

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