AI content creation has become one of the hottest topics in online marketing. From brainstorming blog ideas to writing full articles, AI tools can help you automate practically every step of the process.
For some businesses, automating content creation may just seem like a shortcut to getting more content published faster, but while AI can improve efficiency in some areas, blindly trusting it can cause significant problems for your SEO, credibility, and relationships with your audience.
But does AI content creation kill blogs? Not necessarily. Here’s everything you should know about when and how to use AI tools to create content.
Should you use AI to create content?
AI content creation isn’t objectively good or bad. As with any content marketing strategy, the success of your content comes down to how it's used.
When used correctly, AI can enhance your content workflows and allow your marketing team to be more productive.
Areas where AI Content Creation is Useful
Here’s where AI shines, allowing you to work faster and more efficiently.
Cutting Down on Research and Planning Time
Often, content marketers find themselves spending hours researching a topic, finding content gaps, and outlining article ideas.
AI tools can summarise information for you in seconds, generate quick content briefs, and provide topic suggestions.
Saving you the time of staring at a blank page
AI content generation is especially useful for content planning and ideation.
If you’re an agency or business that manages several content campaigns at once, AI can help you cut down on time spent in the early stages of content production, without taking valuable time from your content creators.
Saving Time and Improving Productivity
A large portion of a content team’s day is spent doing repetitive tasks: Writing meta descriptions, FAQs, creating multiple social media posts and editing existing content to fit new formats. AI content creation is exceptionally good at cutting down these micro tasks.
Instead of replacing human content creators entirely, AI tools should be leveraged to act as your productivity wingman. Handling boring work while you and your team focus on the more important things, creating campaigns, crafting stories, and connecting with your audience.
Brainstorming Ideas
Every writer and content marketer has experienced writer’s block at some point. Whether you’ve been in the industry for a while or just starting out, AI can help you explore new angles, test alternative headlines, generate content ideas, and much more.
Not every suggestion will be helpful, but if you’re struggling to think outside the box or get ideas flowing, letting AI take the wheel for 10-15 minutes can provide some fresh inspiration.
Assisting with SEO
Many AI tools have built-in SEO capabilities that can help you find keywords, write with real content structure, and identify topic opportunities.
When used correctly, AI can save time finding optimisation opportunities to ensure your content matches what users are searching for, helping you crank out content at a quicker pace while also improving your SEO game.
While there are several positives to using AI content generation, it’s important to recognise where it can negatively impact your business.
Where AI Content Creation Can Hurt Your Business
Just because AI can help you publish content faster doesn’t mean it should take the place of everything else.
Businesses who solely lean on AI to produce content learn this the hard way. Here are some common problems that occur when you rely too heavily on AI content generation.
Content lacks originality
AI generated content is notorious for sounding generic, and there are reasons for that.
No matter how advanced AI gets, it will never have real-world experience, opinions, or unique industry insights. AI content regurgitates information based on billions of other web pages, meaning that many AI written blog posts sound just like the hundreds of other pages written about the same topic.
In a world full of generic content shouting for attention. Originality and expert commentary is how you make your brand stand out.
Loses the brand’s voice
Every brand has a unique voice. It communicates its tone through specific words, phrases, and communication styles, and AI can sometimes get confused when trying to replicate your brand’s exact voice. The more you allow it to “write” for you, the more your brand risks losing that personal touch.
Your brand voice is everything your business has worked hard to establish with your customers, and if you let it, AI has the potential to dilute who you are as a business and make your content a lot less engaging.
Can hurt your SEO
Google has made it abundantly clear that experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) matter when ranking websites.
Google isn’t going to penalise your website just because you started using an AI writing tool to generate blog content, but Google will prioritise high-quality content that provides value over thin AI-generated articles that lack depth.
Far too many businesses jump on the AI bandwagon by mass-producing blog content that they barely look over, only to realise their pages aren’t ranking because the content isn’t providing any real value.
Includes incorrect information
While AI tools might be smart, they lack human intelligence to recognise when information is incorrect, outdated, or inaccurate, and if that incorrect info isn’t caught by an actual human, your brand could be spreading false information.
Again, this won’t apply to every industry. But for those who provide service sensitive information. Fact-checking should always be a crucial step in your content creation process.
Using AI to Create Content: Best Practices
The key to successful content creation is finding a happy medium between using AI writing tools and human writers.
Utilise AI for what it does best, streamlining your research, ideation, organisation, and automating the smaller tasks. Allow your human content marketers to do what AI cannot, create engaging content that connects with your audience on a personal level.
By allowing AI and your team to collaborate on content, you’ll produce sharp, informative content at a fraction of the time it would take to write everything manually.
Final Takeaway
AI content creation is not to be feared, but as AI tools become more advanced, it’s important to know how to best utilise it. Like any part of your content marketing strategy, AI should aim to speed up your existing processes, not replace them.
Used wisely, AI content generation can help you improve your content workflows and allow you to get more done without sacrificing the quality of your content. Misused, and you risk posting lifeless content, killing your brand’s voice, hurting your SEO, and losing the trust of your audience.
Both AI and human created content will continue to power the internet, so it’s up to you to learn how to use both to your advantage.
