Ok so there you are, leading your marketing team/department/agency whatever. By now, you and your people have at least played around with generative AI. You’ve done some social posts, some list generation and maybe some longform content. The benefits are pretty obvious, with a little skill in prompting, AI can make some decent content, in a fraction of the time it would take a person. Every marketing team knows content production is one of the most time-consuming activities you can engage in. The brainstorming, outlining, writing, editing, re-writing and (omg!) the APPROVALS! We’ve all felt that pain, and so any tool that can cut down the time it takes to get published is rightfully celebrated.
The question for a leader becomes how, in what ways and to what depth, does AI get integrated into your team and its processes? Do you switch your content plan to 100% AI content and flood the market? Do you approach it more surgically, replace key steps in the process with AI, but maintain that your content should generally be human written? Do you use it with only some content? Just short form? Just long form? Yes to AI video’s or not?
Here’s my answer – wherever you’re comfortable with simple, low-information content, use that AI all the live long day. Anywhere else – write it yourself, and err on the side of avoiding AI in the process.
The reason for it is counter-intuitive; I think the unlooked for benefit of AI is the premium it will place on true creativity and superior writing skills. Remember, what we call AI today is actually a language model (called Large Language Models or LLM’s). It doesn’t have thoughts, it simply figures out what word is most likely to come next and slaps it in there. For that reason, it is very difficult for AI to have a truly original idea that is actually valuable (AI can come up with something original, but it’s usually hilariously wrong).
That means that AI writing can be good, but we’re a long way from it being truly great. Those who have worked closely with content performance know that it’s a fickle game – what you thought was going to be a guaranteed winner will bomb, and the half-assed article you wrote off the side of your desk (but you would never do that, right?) will go gangbusters. By turning your content production plan over to AI, you’re playing a tough game with one hand behind your back, you’re sacrificing any chance you have of achieving truly great content results.
What’s even better – your competitors probably will overuse AI content. They’ll flood their channels with every kind of content they can think of, courtesy of AI, and never see themselves going over the cliff. I say that because for the immediate future AI content will perform well, and you might even have one or two articles get huge numbers. But just like how your grandparents on Facebook started out cute, it will get old sooner than you think. Once it does, people will avoid your content like the plague. It happened with listicles (articles in the form of lists), it happened with keyword stuffing, it happens with popular memes.
Then the inevitable happens – Google will penalize trashy AI content in search rankings. They’ll have to. The more search rankings are flooded with useless AI content, the more users will flee to other platforms like Reddit (which they’ve already been doing for years). Google can’t have that, search users are the heart of their business.
And by the way – it will happen to you. This dynamic may not play out exactly so in your industry, but it doesn’t matter. Once it happens to a number of critical, high-volume industries, Google will apply changes across the board, and your AI content will get swept up in the algorithm update.
And yes, LLM’s will get better. The content they produce will get better. We will have a harder and harder time distinguishing AI content from human writing. But the fundamental premise isn’t likely to change anytime soon. They are still language models – they are going off of what has already been written. Bad actors will confound attempts to make AI more trustworthy. You will always need the human writer. Honestly, this shouldn’t surprise you. Look to social media. Your content is a smash hit when it’s fresh and creative – rehashing previous topics, formats and gimmicks has always shown diminishing returns.
It’s the formulaic content that gets replaced. Which is good, we could all do with a little less of that anyway.
