Writers are a living, breathing part of human society. Writers create the novels we read, the movies we watch, the adverts we consume and the marketing that surrounds us. But today’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology companies seem to be in an ever-increasing race to erase human content writing in the business world.
Write faster! Scale up your content! Replace your slow, human writers. But I think most of these tech companies are missing the point of WHY you hire a writer at all.
You don’t hire writers simply to produce nice, readable copy. You hire business writers because they have an innate ability to identify your pain points, spot the opportunities and understand your product in the way that only a human consumer can.
And, more than anything, you pay writers to have ideas that will get your messaging across to an expectant audience.
So, why are we in an ongoing race to automate the writing process? And why is a good human writer far more than just a ‘word-generation worker’?
What skills does a good writer have?
Most AI content writing is based on a misconception. Trying to replace human content writers by automatically putting a string of words in good grammatical order is missing the point. The text is just ONE thing that a good writer brings to the table – a well-crafted collection of words is the end output of a much bigger process.
Being a good business writer is about:
- Talking to the client and finding out what makes their business tick
- Getting to know the founder, MD or CEO, so you understand them as people
- Learning as much as possible about their products and/or services
- Finding out who their customers are and how they resolve their pain points
- Listening to customer stories, so you understand the true value of the brand
- Reworking, retelling and reviving these stories to convey key messages
- Evolving and refining their brand and tone to engage with their customers
- Writing copy that fosters curiosity, humour or perceived value.
A good copywriter or content writer is an ideas factory.
Give a writer a problem, an opportunity or a product and they’ll give you multiple ideas about how to tell a story around this topic. But that process of ideation isn’t just about data points and cold analytics. It’s about emotions, feelings and the impact these words can have on the human cortex.
Why AI content writing tools will always be the vanilla option
AI writing tools, like ChatGPT and Google Bard, are great at writing anodyne, vanilla content. AI uses good grammar and spelling. But there’s nothing in these words that sets a fire in your belly, or causes sparks to fly through your neural pathways.
As I pointed out in another recent blog post, AI writing is the equivalent of eating a pot noodle when what you actually want is a delicious, home-cooked meal.
The output from an AI tool will fill up your blog and give you 800 words to fling out into the digital wasteland, hoping for a great SEO score and some customer engagement. But once your blog comes up in a Google search, are your intended customer audience actually going to engage with it in the way you wanted?
Ultimately, if we’re all using AI writing tools, everyone’s writing will eventually sound the same. It’s readable, makes sense and gets the job done. But it has zero personality. There’s not an ounce of genuine human creativity in there. So, when your SEO expert ensures that your post ends up on page one of Google, will anyone actually read it? Your writing still has to resonate with the audience on an emotional, human level. If it doesn’t, people will just move on to the next post.
We’ve all been there…”Oh, this blog sounds helpful, I’ll click on the link…OK, hmmm…this is not great…a bit repetitive…not much insight…PASS!’
What you don’t want is potential readers bouncing away from your content. And yet, if we force yet more substandard AI copy-meat into our content sausage machine, we can’t be surprised when people leave the article pushed to the side of the plate and refuse to consume it.
Google loves authorative, original content and rewards you with better search results because of this. But will generic AI-written content actually pass this test? Even huge international marketing platforms, like Hubspot, are wary about how AI content will be measured and will perform as AI content becomes more prevalent.
“Now, more than ever, the value of content hinges on the authenticity of its creator and the underlying value, meaning, story, and perspective of the content they’re creating.”
Josh Blyskal, Associate Marketing Technical Manager at HubSpot.
Quality is a better goal than scalability
“If you want great ideas, human stories and messaging that actually connects with your audience’s brains, then you need a human writer on your team.”
As the saying goes, the cream rises to the top. And the same is true of content writing.
So, if you’re thinking about replacing your marketing team or your content team with AI, think again. You’re working under a misapprehension from the get go.
You don’t hire experienced, smart human writers to spit out 800 words of ‘content’. You hire them because they have the intelligence, empathy, understanding and story-telling abilities that have made them seek out a professional writing career in the first place.
Instead, aim to write something that actually gets people thinking, talking and sharing your content. And, if we’re totally honest, that’s simply not going to happen with AI-generated, identikit content. In fact, badly written content can hold back your SEO.
In the great sea of digital content that we must all wade through, your content needs to be an idyllic island of originality and personality in an ocean of mediocrity.
Haruki Murakami is a novelist who’s made an entire career out of having a very distinct, personal and unique writing style. And, as he says, it pays to sound different:
“If you want to say something different from other people, use language that’s different from other people. I’ve lost the exact reference, and it’s not a verbatim quotation, but these are F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words. I read this when I was young, and it’s remained etched in my mind. I think it’s helped me a lot as a writer.”
Haruki Murakami, Interview Magazine, 2022
So, by all means, use AI tools like ChatGPT to come up with blog outlines, content summaries and other content-creation ideas – it never hurts to have a few tools to help you get the job done, after all. But don’t for a second think that you can replace a good human writer with an AI algorithm.
If you want great ideas, human stories and messaging that actually connects with your audience’s brains, then you need a human writer on your team.
Spice up your writing with killer content tips
If you think it pays to sound different, it’s worth polishing up your content-writing chops and getting back to the basics of good writing.
‘How To Write Killer Content For Your Startup’ has all the hacks and advice you need to bring the personality out in your business writing. Learn how to understand your brand, get your tone on point and come up with copy that leaves a lasting impression.
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