Will AI Replace Content Writers? Not Anytime Soon.

Last Updated on August 19, 2022 by Nathaniel Tower

Note: On August 18, 2022, Google announced the Helpful Content Update. This update seems to specifically target AI-generated content. Google has made repeated statements about how it favors content written by humans, for humans. If you are using artificial intelligence to write website content, you may want to reconsider this approach in order to stay in good graces with Google! Having a lot of low-quality, AI-type content on your site could hurt how well all your content ranks in search results.

If you’re a writer, you’ve probably heard the buzz about artificial intelligence writing tools. Some writers are even afraid for their jobs.

I’m here to tell you some good news—AI is not going to place real human writers, at least not anytime soon.

That doesn’t mean AI writing is going to go away. Quite the contrary. It will only get much bigger. Lots of brands are investing in AI writing tools right now. Platforms like Jasper are growing rapidly every day. This isn’t a surprise at all. These tools are marketed well, brands have heard repeatedly how important it is to invest in content, and AI tools can generate content quickly at scale.

Before we go and attack the robots here, let’s talk about some of the good things. There are no doubt some advantages to AI writing:

• It can save time
• It can generate a lot of words quickly
• It can generate a lot of ideas quickly to help you overcome writer’s block
• It can build an outline
• It can do some limited research for you
• It can analyze data and get smarter (with constant human help)

All these great things aside, robots are still robots right now. If you’ve ever taken a creative writing course, you’ve probably received some feedback that your writing felt robotic. This is not a good thing.

In my experience with testing AI writing tools for long-form content, I’ve actually found myself spending more time correcting what the AI tool created than I would if I just wrote a piece from scratch. Maybe that’s because I’m a perfectionist, but I would never be satisfied with anything written by a robot right now.

Here are some of the biggest reasons you shouldn’t trust AI writing tools just yet:

AI writing tools don’t understand style and tone

Almost every AI writing platform allows you to input a handful of words that define the style and tone of the writing you want it to create. However, AI tools generally have a very limited ability to comprehend anything other than a very basic style and tone. And you can usually only give it two or three words to describe the voice.

If you tell an AI tool to create content that is professional or serious versus comical or whimsical, then the AI tool can do a decent enough job. For example, it won’t try to tell jokes in a professional or serious article. That’s a good start, right? (On the flipside though, the jokes it will try to tell in a comical article will probably be worse than dad jokes.)

However, there is no way to communicate your brand’s entire voice to an AI writing platform. So while a human writer can read through a style guide and understand all the intricacies of word choice, style preferences, syntax, and other elements that help define a brand’s voice, an AI tool can only understand the most basic commands.

With these limited inputs available, here’s what ends up happening with an AI tool—almost all writing ends up sounding like it could have been written for any brand.

AI content is bad for SEO

If you are creating content through an AI tool with the intention of getting it to rank on Google, then you are violating one of Google’s guidelines. And if you know anything about search engine optimization (SEO), then you know this is a very bad thing.

As recently as April 2022, Google made its stance on AI writing clear:

“Currently, it’s all against the webmaster guidelines. So from our point of view, if we were to run across something like that, if the webspam team were to see it, they would see it as spam.”

Does that mean it won’t work? Not necessarily. Many people have successfully ranked webpages by violating Google’s guidelines. However, in my experience, any content that is purely generated by an AI platform needs a lot of human intervention before it is good enough to be published, let alone rank well in search engines.

Now, you’re probably wondering how exactly Google can tell if content is generated by AI. Given that Google has invested billions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, I’m going to trust that it has the resources to figure it out.

And most humans can still detect whether a piece of content was generated by another human or by a machine. So Google must have at least one leg up on the AI writers at the moment.

So go ahead and use AI content if you want, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t rank well. You could even get a manual penalty from Google if you publish enough of it.

AI writing needs a lot of fact-checking

AI writing isn’t magical. It works by reading a bunch of other articles or stories on a similar topic, and then it pieces together the article you want. Or, to put it more accurately, it creates an article it “thinks” you want.

While that sounds like it could save you a lot of time, it doesn’t do any fact-checking for you (outside of a quick plagiarism check). Most AI writing just assumes that anything it reads about a topic is probably true. Of course, AI writing tools focus on select websites and databases. They don’t reference everything on the web, so this does give it better odds of only writing things that are accurate. Unfortunately, it also makes AI tools trust their sources without question.

In my use of AI writing tools, I’ve found dozens of factual inaccuracies that needed to be corrected before an article could be published.

Now, that’s not to say the AI tool always got it wrong or used a bad source. In many instances, it uses a source that contradicts the information I am trying to provide. In other instances, though, it simply referenced a biased article to generate the content.

For example, let’s say I want to write an article about whether HubSpot is better than Salesforce. The AI tool is going to use whatever articles it’s referencing to make up its mind. I might need my article to show that HubSpot is the better platform based on the angle I am taking, but if the AI tool finds an article on the Salesforce website as a main reference point, then the output is going to contradict my hypothesis. The result will be a very bad article for me, one I will likely have to completely rewrite.

Another issue we often see with AI writing is that it uses a lot of placeholders or made-up facts in order to finish an article. For example, the AI tools I’ve tested will create fake brand names and insert them into my articles. When creating an article for an ecommerce website recently, a very popular AI tool came up with the name “Weight Gurus” and made the claim that we were based in Australia even though I had clearly told the tool our audience was based in the U.S. Without human intervention, this would be a very bad look for your brand!

Ultimately, you can use an AI writing tool to get you started, but you are going to have to update a lot of things before you can publish.

Final thoughts on AI writing tools

Let’s not kid ourselves. AI tools will have a big impact on the future of marketing and writing. They are already helping brands create a lot more content a lot more quickly. And they have the potential to do a better job than humans because they can analyze data a lot faster and make better decisions about the length of a headline, the placement of a word in marketing copy, or the right adjective to use to make a piece really compelling.

But AI writing has a long way to go right now. It’s often clunky, it requires a lot of human intervention to create a strong finished product, and it doesn’t have the ability to capture a brand voice or appeal to a very specific audience.

This isn’t to say that every human writer is better than every AI writing tool. Many pieces created by artificial intelligence are much better than writing from an average human. But if you are a good writer, then you probably leave AI in your dust.

My advice to writers—start testing AI tools so you can understand how they work. This may help to improve your own writing, and it will also help you continue to develop your skills in an ever-changing world. If you are a professional writer, you might need to use AI tools in the future to keep your job.

While AI might be able to produce a headline that gets more clicks today, I don’t see an AI novel becoming a fan favorite or bestseller anytime soon.

And the version of this article that artificial intelligence tried to create was a steaming pile of crap.

Have you tested any AI writing tools? Share your experience in the comments. 

Will AI replace content writers?

It's unlikely that AI will replace human writers anytime soon because AI does not have the nuance required to complete the tasks of a human writer. For simple tasks, like reporting on sports scores with no commentary, AI writing has already replaced human writers in some circumstances. If you are a strong writer with the ability to create compelling content, you shouldn't be afraid of AI writing.

Why should I use an AI writing tool?

An AI writing tool is useful if you want to save some time outlining a topic, brainstorming ideas, or performing simple writing assignments. If you want to produce great writing that resonates with readers or ranks well in search engines, you should be very cautious with AI writing.