Content is “king” according to marketers. And according to many, human-generated content is now dead and the people making a living from creating it should go learn another skill. Enter the AI.
Jasper AI promises in its advertising to let you write blog posts “ten times faster.” It’s only one of a number of AI content generators that sell themselves as fast ways to create large amounts of content.
So, is human-generated content dead? Are all future blogs going to be written by the robots? Should content creators start sprucing up their resumes?
With current generations of AI: Absolutely not.
To drill down a little further, you need to understand how these AI things work. Note that I didn’t say “it is important to understand.” Why? “It is important” is one of the phrases the popular AI text generator ChatGPT overuses. So you’ll probably see it used less.
Your phone contains an AI text generator. When you text your friend, words appear that you can add with one click. The text generator learns what words you use and suggests the most likely next word based on that. The goal is to save you time while texting. It sometimes does things that are wrong or even hilarious. You’ve probably seen the memes where you share what it gives you.
ChatGPT is a much more sophisticated version of this. Instead of guessing based off of the user, it guesses based off of the text it was trained on. Technically, this is not an AI, but a “large language model.” The goal is to make it sound like a human, but it does so by mimicking what humans are most likely to say. It does not know what it is saying or the context. It is guessing.
You can probably see one of the initial issues. All a LLM can do is regurgitate from what it was trained on. So, here is why you should hire a human writer to make your marketing content:
- AI content is, by definition, derivative. That is all it can do. A human writer can spruce it up and make it better, but it still requires substantial work.
- AI content can get you dinged by Google. Let’s say you ask an AI to write you a blog post about how often you need to paint your house. The AI will put together a pastiche of all of the other blog posts on how often you need to paint your house. This can then show up as duplicate content and drop the ranking of your site.
- AI gets facts just plain wrong. In one high profile incident, an author asked ChatGPT about himself and was informed that he died in 2017. ChatGPT also makes up citations. If you rely on AI you have to cross check everything to make sure it is correct. You might have to do that with a human writer too, but it’s less likely and you can ask them to fix it for you if they do make a mistake.
- AI writing cannot be copyrighted. You can’t copyright it without “substantial” human work, and the courts have yet to define “substantial” in this context. Meaning you have no recourse if somebody steals your hard work and posts it on their site. You can’t sue them, because there is no copyright. And, again, there’s no solid definition of “substantial” here as yet.
Is AI useful for certain things? Absolutely. For example, an AI could probably write pretty decent product descriptions, or at least provide a framework that a human could then go add subjective value to. AI writing is also typically grammatically correct. But if you want content that is entertaining, informative, and shows personality, then you still need to hire a human being.
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