Have you tried ChatGPT, the latest AI offering in the content world? Garnering its first 1,000 000 users in just three days, it seems ChatGPT and AI writing is taking over. Today, we’re assessing whether AI is truly the future of content writing.
What is AI Content Writing?
Content writing uses AI chatbots – like ChatGPT – to produce content pieces like blogs, email campaigns, audience personas, and more. AI chatbots can produce long-form content comprising thousands of words in mere moments. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the capabilities of AI content writing.
How does AI writing work?
Using AI to write content is surprisingly simple. The user can input a highly detailed prompt and hit enter to set the AI in motion. Here’s an example of a prompt you might use with a chatbot.
Input: You are a highly experienced travel agent with an authoritative writing style. You will produce a 1,400-word article listing California’s seven best cities for students to visit. You will include bullet point lists of the top 5 best sights to see in each city and the best restaurants that supply student discounts. Please also recommend ways to travel around the cities.
Detailed inputs with word counts generally produce the most well-rounded results with chatbots. Inputs like this one will create an article of exactly 1,400 words, incorporating all the requested sections in roughly a minute or two. It’s easy to see how someone could think AI might take over the content writing career.
How does AI Affect Writers?
For content writers, AI has both positive and negative impacts. Let’s discuss the apparent negatives first.
What are the Negatives of AI for Writers?
For many writers, AI has already had a negative effect. Rather than having a qualified content writer create pieces of work, some companies prefer to use AI-based chatbots because they are faster and cheaper. Many freelance writers also receive AI-generated content from clients and are tasked with ‘humanising’ the content.
Any writers who rely on AI chatbots like ChatGPT to create content for them also have another thing coming. Chatbots need to improve, and any writer that tries to pass AI-generated content as their own is likely to face issues from clients. AI content often plagiarises existing work and can even produce inaccurate writing that doesn’t mention relevant aspects of a subject.
Content writers can use AI to their benefit, however.
What are the Positives of AI for Writers?
Content writers can use AI as a tool for various aspects of content creation. One way to use AI is to analyse the style and tone of a client’s website. By inputting the website’s URL, writers can ask the AI to produce an analysis to get an idea of how the client likes their content. From here, writers can customise their approach to writing with the appropriate stylistic and tonal features in mind.
AI is also helpful for writers to save time when they’re optimising content for SEO. They can perform keyword research using AI tools that help streamline the SEO process. In a project’s early stages, AI can help writers identify long-tail keywords that boost the content. Writers can also use AI when they’re editing to insert more keywords or relevant terms.
An Overview of AI and Content Writers
Content writers can use AI to improve their work and efficiency in a few ways.
- AI can create drafts, including header tags and outlines for content that writers can fill out.
- When writers face a block, bouncing ideas around with an AI chatbot can stimulate their creativity and make it easier to find new ideas.
- Writers can use AI to make the initial stages of research much faster and simpler, giving them more time to write and edit.
On the other hand, here are some drawbacks of using AI to create content
- It only has access to information from late 2021, meaning it’s outdated in some ways.
- The internet is replete with misinformation and inaccuracies, making it easy to produce the wrong content.
- AI can only create content from what already exists, meaning it often plagiarises existing material.
Is AI the Future of Content Writing?
Ultimately, AI is more of a tool for content writers rather than an outright replacement. Sure, some smaller companies will use AI chatbots like ChatGPT to produce their content, but it won’t compare to the work of human writers.
The future of content writing will likely be a combination of machine and human-created work. AI can increase efficiency and output for writers, saving time and money. It can’t create excellent quality content without risking plagiarism; sometimes, its content is inaccurate or incomplete; always including human writers secures the perfect outcome.
The best content writers will learn the ins and outs of AI tools to streamline their process. The best use for AI is to automate time-consuming tasks for writers rather than creating content from start to finish. AI only represents the future of content writing for content writers; it simply isn’t an adequate replacement for the work a human mind can create.
Author bio: Bethany Massey is a freelance copywriter working with The Author’s Pad to help copywriters at every stage of their career. Bethany has been a copywriter for five years; she looks forward to the future of content writing. When she’s not writing, Bethany is usually cooking, reading, or spending time in the woods with her dog.