Overall, AI Comes With Several Risks and Potential Opportunities
I believe that AI can make our daily activities smarter and more efficient. AI is efficient at assisting content marketers with elements of the content creation process.
For marketing, when used with the right intentions and human supervision, AI will be a powerful tool in a brand’s arsenal.
AI can generate several quick ideas and content topics as a starting point for content creators’ research and outline. AI can help generate titles and headers, ideas and brainstorming, meta descriptions, and then some.
We have even developed our own software that can make the content creation process smarter, better, faster, and wiser.
The key takeaway here is to use AI tools to help you in areas where you are weak, like brainstorming content ideas, coming up with new titles, new angles, or even pitches.
That said, sometimes there’s this push from companies to jump headfirst into automating everything. It’s understandable—they see the speed and cost-efficiency AI promises on paper. But I’ve noticed, after talking to a few marketing teams, that the most successful folks blend automation with a heavy dose of human judgment. People still want to feel something when they read, and, let’s be honest, a robot can’t muster real curiosity or make a reader laugh (at least not intentionally). That matters far more often than it’s given credit for in those boardroom slides touting “AI Synergy.”
There’s also the weird reality that as more content gets churned out by machines, that small spark of originality—someone’s odd idea, a story from their own life, even a typo that turns into a running joke—becomes even more precious. Lately, I find myself paying extra attention to writing that veers off script just to see if it’s human or not. It’s almost a little game now. I guess that’s one small side effect of the AI boom: readers, not just writers, are becoming connoisseurs in spotting the difference between a sanitized wall of text and something that breathes.
The Importance of Human Touch
It must be said, however, one should not leave it up to AI entirely. It shouldn’t be a substitute for human writers, but rather an assistant to them.
While it looks like AI content generators have the power to speed up your content lifecycle, they’re not always the answer.
AI commoditizes content creation, while at the same time, it makes handmade content more valuable. It’s clear, however, that nothing replaces the human touch.
All in all, AI can serve as a remarkable productivity tool and assist with ideation, outline creation, and matchmaking. However, we believe that AI-generated content cannot replace the personal touch and depth that only human-produced content can provide.
We won’t allow AI-generated content on our platform and notify writers who use AI for content creation that their pieces will not be delivered to customers.
For all these reasons, I am pretty confident that writers will use AI as a tool to increase their efficiency and productivity, not for creating content.
Editing and Fact-Checking
AI-generated writing highlights the need for editing and fact-checking. Some recent high-profile incidents confirm that with AI — as with human writers — editing and fact-checking need to be an essential part of the process.
Just to share one of the many examples, Men’s Journal recently published an article written using AI that had plenty of major errors in health content; errors that could have more serious consequences than those in a blog post by a tech startup.
Originality and Plagiarism
If we consider the formal definition of plagiarism, AI content generation tools do not copy and paste content.
When someone uses an AI content creation tool to generate ideas or to write a blog post, the tool is using what it has learned from reading numerous pages to generate new content. This means that the content produced has been done so in an original way.
Google’s policies confirm that AI-created content is not considered plagiarism. Instead, it’s an original text based on the information available.
AI pulls from multiple sources to create the content users search for. The legal risk is, of course, that authors could sue for plagiarism of their original work if the copy generated by AI is too closely related to the original.
From a content marketing and SEO perspective, one big drawback of AI-generated content is that it’s not totally original. In fact, AI content generators simply collect and combine (nicely, I must admit) information that’s already available on the internet.
Final Thoughts
So, while the content might pass a plagiarism check, it won’t contain original research, insights, or data. In practice, AI-assisted content creation tools can create simple pieces of text, but they are incapable of providing opinions or creating thought leadership content pieces.
Finally, AI-content generators can’t write about events or rapidly changing topics either. They also struggle with subjects that society hasn’t formed a consensus on, among them social, political, and religious issues. If you attempt to generate text on these topics, you might end up with biased, inaccurate, or out-of-date content.
I assume that companies who choose to depend on AI content creation software to generate their professional content rather than hiring human creative writers are making a calculated business decision.
