Will AI Replace Content Writers?

When I originally drafted this article, back in November, ChatGPT wasn’t on anyone’s radar yet. Now, just two months later, everyone from celebrities like Ryan Reynolds to normal people like my husband are using the tool, for better or for worse. (If you haven’t heard of or used ChatGPT yet, ChatGPT—the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a chatbot launched by OpenAI and built on top of OpenAI's GPT-3 family of large language models.)

Here’s the video:

So, are we all going to lose our jobs to tools like this? I do think that ChatGPT can do a decent job in some tasks, and can actually be a really useful tool for things like outlining, chat bot conversations, and landing pages.

However, there’s a big difference between a bot making a script for an ad, and what actually makes the ad, in this case, the Ryan Reynolds spot, funny—and that is the human doing the acting.

That’s how I feel about all AI-generated content in general—we can throw out the bad stuff automatically. We can use the tool to help us do better work. And then we can make it human, and stand out above any AI-generated content.

That’s what you get when you replace professional, human content writers with AI-generated content. Sure, the output is readable. But is that really all we’re going for? If you care about your website, it shouldn’t be.

Will AI replace content writers?

I went down a Reddit rabbit hole reading other thoughts on this, and I think the best answer came from one user:

Can it? Sure can. But will it when it comes to meaningful content? Probably not for a long time.

AI-generated content for websites and blogs won’t replace quality content writers any time soon, because AI-created content isn’t necessarily good—or reliable.

Google says AI writing is against its guidelines, considering it spam.

This is bad news bears for companies utilizing AI content in an attempt to rank on Google, obviously. Google’s summer 2022 helpful content update shared these bullet points:

If you’re a business owner considering using AI-driven writing tools to make your content output faster, and you care if Google sees the product, be aware that AI content will potentially cannibalize your efforts.

We say it’s bad, too.

I mentioned above that AI-generated content may have a place in short, impersonal methods of communication, but I think it is lightyears away from quality, human-produced content. Of course our team is biased… but we also wanted to have some proof for why we feel excellent content requires a human touch. So Nectafy tested eight of them to see if we should scrap this whole growth content thing. Going into the test, we believed AI-generated content wasn’t going to compare to what an actual human with writing expertise would produce, and the results proved us right.

Here’s the resulting content from a few bots based on prompting about “becoming a freelance writer”:

Find out all the AI generators we tried and learn about the whole experiment here: We Tried Out Some AI Content Generators And... It's Not Pretty.

In addition, AI content isn’t going to eliminate actual writers anytime soon, because the finished product still requires heavy editing (from a human) to make sense to a reader and in order to fact check what’s written.

AI is good at automating research, summarizing, and pulling together sentences, but it isn’t good enough—it isn’t able to bridge the gap between compilation and flow.

If you’re considering shelling out money for an AI writing system or platform, understand every piece of content produced will need an editor to review for both line edits and overall comprehension.

Finally, this type of content isn’t creative—as Meredith says in the above Nectafy article,

And that’s not all. You need more than (AI- or person-generated) words on a page to be successful in content marketing.

If you’re looking for an article rewriter, then give AI a try. Even if you have a robo-scribe you trust, if there’s no strategy to provide structure and reason to your neural content, you won’t get actionable results that improve your website’s traffic and conversion.

But if you want to be successful, you need more than just content. You also need:

• SEO expertise: A data-backed strategy to help you rank for the right searches.
• Excellent content: well-written, accurate, truthful long-form pieces you can be proud of.
• Industry expertise: Expert-based subject matter interviews for every single piece of content.
• A process for executing your content marketing plan: A proven way for all the pieces to work together, so you can count on consistently.

At Nectafy, that’s exactly what we do.

We’re real, live experts in growth content who know writing content isn’t as simple as finding a topic and telling your robot to write 2000 words. At Nectafy, keyword research, thorough strategy, domain authority built over weeks and months through consistent, high-value content, and interviews done with actual experts in their field, are just a few ingredients that set us apart.

Want to see if Nectafy can help you build Growth Content to fuel your vision? Then schedule a call to tell us why you think Growth Content is going to work for you.