Humans Are Superior at Conveying True Experience and Emotion
Creative writing classes are the incubators of some of our best communicators. Storytelling is how we pass down information and history. If we lose the ability to write, our communication suffers and our cognitive abilities could be in trouble. The mind is like a muscle. Do you notice you get tired from mental activity? If we stop using our minds for creative writing, are we in trouble? Let’s consider how valuable we are as human beings with emotion and knowledge to share with the world through the written word.
It is a common human trait to be curious about new things. It is natural for us to wonder how new technologies can help improve our lives. Through testing and adopting, we determine what we like and what we don’t need. Remember when everyone was talking about eBooks and Kindle readers? When was the last time you saw one of those ads? I think people who read sent the message that we all prefer traditional books over technology.
When we went digital, we learned about keywords and search engine optimization, but how far we let SEO go in directing our communication is still up to us; we are still the humans in charge, not just “in the loop.”
People Are Testing AI and Some Use It, Others Decide to Lose It
There’s a new toy, and everyone loves taking their turn trying to use it. Generative AI is available through some relatively reliable providers of artificial intelligence. The top players boast impressive results, including one scoring 90 percent on the multistate bar exam. Meanwhile, others are taking it upon themselves to safeguard the world from change, putting their foot down and saying no to AI. Many courts, for example, prohibit AI-generated documents filed by attorneys, which stirred up many lawyers who were ready to go to battle.
Different from the Internet, artificial intelligence exists in proprietary knowledge base systems, and there is no shared brain across all platforms. So, different providers have different quality products, some of which are more reliable than others. As people learn to be better prompt engineers, they are able to create output that is close to or better than what they can do on their own. Factual accuracy aside, it’s the human creative component the AI lacks, and as humans, we crave authenticity in communication. We don’t always know why, but we recognize our preference for human-written content over AI-generated content.
Common reasons people reject generative AI include concerns about content being marked as SPAM in emails and by search engine robots. In content marketing, websites with too much AI content could lose rank for authenticity concerns. None of us can claim to know what will happen to us with any certainty, but we can all get on board with the longstanding general rule that Google rewards good old-fashioned hard work and frequent originally human-written content.
I Tried It – I Liked It – Things Bothered Me – I Stopped Using It
My first experience with generative AI was researching topic ideas, keywords, and content calendars. I got more daring and asked it for lists of things that made sense for use in an article here and there. I run everything through spell and grammar checks on Grammarly in any case, so I figured all was well and it saved me some time. Then I talked to another digital marketing agency owner about adding a ton of evergreen content and pages to his clients’ websites, which drove them right to page one. I know that is a short gain strategy and it doesn’t surf on top long-term without legitimate, frequent original content.
I took testing AI to a new level and secured a contract job with a tech firm to be a law reviewer, checking the work of law students trying to outdo the AI systems in writing summaries of seminal court cases. I learned that all I needed to do was write the best prompts, tailored for specific purposes, and couple that with bullet points for articles to create the so-called perfect output.
We could go back and forth on ethics, technology, and search engine issues all day long, but at the end of the day, I think it’s an individual decision whether to use generative AI and for me, I just decided I was done with it. I missed writing. I am a good writer. I learn by researching before writing, and I never want to stop learning.
It Started with SEO and Keywords
Writing for Chicago Tribune publications back in the mid-2000s, I was taught to write for humans first and robots second. We learned Google algorithms manually and could tell you why titles with three words followed by a colon would rank higher than titles without colons. SEO was, is, and will always be a moving target. The only expert is the one who writes the algorithm, and that’s an egregious oversimplification.
Our artistic and eye-catching titles started taking a back seat to keyword-focused titles to feed search engines and make sure our sites continue to show up in search engines and make us look good when people Google our name or business.
One of the factors for ranking content in search engines is authenticity. Another is readability. Sometimes, our authentic written words are not the most readable, and anyone who uses Grammarly to spell and check grammar knows we all need another set of eyes. Here’s the risk with Grammarly: as a checker, it’s great, but if you use the premium services, it will actually rewrite your content for different tones and tenses. After a while, is it your content anymore? Where do you draw the line? You can see how easy it is to fall down a slippery slope.
Current Internet Technology is Advanced and Understands Our Written Word
The need for keywords and structure is rooted in the need for search engines to understand, rank, categorize, and display our websites and content in search engine results. Now, the same AI we are criticizing is helping search engines understand our human written language. The argument now may be in favor of staying with or returning to naturally human written content and letting the search engines do their thing. As advanced as the content analysis tools become, search engines could infer all sorts of things from our human written content, such as our likely level of education and experience and where we are from, based on word choices.
Maybe we can write those compelling titles again. Maybe we can stop freaking out over hashtags. Maybe we can just write.
The Cult of Amature and Risk of SPAM: The Cost of Generative AI Content
There is a reason people go to school and learn on the job in a career track involving writing and publishing. Marketing degrees and colleges of communication at major universities are still very valuable. We should all be concerned about marketing companies opening the craft of content creation to anyone who can talk to a generative AI chatbot.
I have caught others publishing incorrect information that suggests the person behind the content has no actual idea what they are communicating in AI content. This used to be the reason people stopped using outsourced foreign content marketing farms where the English and dialect just weren’t right, and the subject mastery was significantly lacking.
Now, those firms are using AI to fill the Internet and websites with content requiring the “human in the loop” to oversee and do quality control. There are too many risks to our personal and professional brands to be using low-quality content and that is what we are finding in too many instances.
How Crazy: Organic Educated Human Written Content is Our Unique Selling Point
I’ve been successful in the business of content marketing for law firms and businesses because I’m a good writer, and I am well-versed in many substantive areas in law and life. It was always a given that lawyers would prefer to hire a marketing professional with a law degree and substantive experience in law practice.
Nobody is going to hear me being a hater and trashing others or their choices. However, for me and the people I work with, the unique value of working with me is my human brain and intelligence. When I decided to pull the plug on generative AI in content creation, all I felt was a sigh of relief.
Author: Nick Augustine
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