AI-Generated Blogs Versus Human-Written Blogs: Part I
Sometimes, I ask myself, is it okay to quit something? Or, should you keep trying till you succeed? It’s a difficult question to answer. One might say, that if you don’t see success within a couple of years, you should probably quit. We’re passionate about many things in life, but we can’t be good at all of them. We can be excellent at many things, but we’re not passionate about them. Sometimes, we do them because we’ve always done them this way. Sometimes, we quit because the going gets unbearable and we don’t care about what the four mouths outside will say. As they say, kuchh toh log kahenge, logo ka kaam hai kehna.
However, how do you decide what the heart wants? And, how do you know what it wants in the first place? Though the heart can be fleeting, our gut feeling will always be the same. Whenever you have a question in mind, ask your ‘gut’ and it always answers. If it tells you to quit and let go, you do that. However, if it wants you to persevere despite the challenges, you try, try and try again. Whether it’s at a job, your passion project or an extracurricular activity, always keep going if your gut tells you to do. And, don’t care too much about what the world will say. Believe it or not, you know yourself better than anyone else.
Now that we’re in the year's second half, and I run on little time and energy, let’s talk about this. As we all know, artificial intelligence is a huge part of contemporary digital life. Whether ChatGPT, Google Assistant, Google Lens, Netflix, Spotify and Amazon recommendations (both movies and online shopping) or even the surprising Grammar Check, Quick Reply and Smart Response on your Gmail, artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s like they have been following us daily, noting down the kind of conversations we have, the type of food we enjoy and the kind of movies we watch. Technologically speaking, it’s an exciting time to be young.
However, there’s a huge debate about whether artificial intelligence will also take over the writing industry. After all, what is AI-generated content? In simple terms, artificial intelligence uses data from existing algorithms and analysis to create content — text, audio and visuals. Some people fear using AI in their content, while others are more accepting of it. There’s no right or wrong to this, I believe that it’s simply a matter of preference or requirement in the industry. In my opinion, here’s why AI-generated come becomes a boon or bane for those with a career in writing. What do you think?
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
― Alan Turing, Computing machinery and intelligence
Fast and efficient
If you’re a blogger who enjoys writing on their weekends, you might not like this point. On the other hand, we can’t deny that the world is constantly moving towards advanced technology. For the rest of the community who need content to be written and don’t want to hire professionals, they choose artificial intelligence to write their blog posts for them. Are they always accurate is debatable to me, because you’ll always need a human eye to examine what’s been written before you publish them on your website? What it does is give you a structured blog post using the brief shared, but you still need to check the facts.
The other thing about AI-generated blog posts is that they optimise written content to make it more suitable for your target audience, thus contributing to higher user engagement. A human writer analyses a hundred websites, checks out their competitors’ blogs, makes notes, creates a strategy and sits down to write a blog post. It might take anywhere between seven to ten days for a detailed and extremely well-researched blog post, and I might even be wrong. An ‘AI blog-writing platform’ tells you about the latest trends and techniques in blogging, uses the right keywords and measures the success of your content in a minute.
Conducts ideation and research
To some, research is the most tiresome part of writing a blog post. If you’re writing an article on health and medicine, science and technology or subjects where everything is objective, you need to have all your data in place. In the olden days when people had to work on a thesis by hand, they pored over tomes of books in the library, contacted the prolific geniuses in their field by letter and conducted primary research using what samples they had available. With the arrival of computers, the internet and then artificial intelligence, all of them are now one simplified process that takes half the time and energy.
Going forward, artificial intelligence will look up new content ideas and keywords in one go. It gives you all the case studies, white papers and charts that you need in one click. However, you need to be extremely cautious with what it shows you. I have heard reports of AI tools often displaying inaccurate or unethical results, and that reflects poorly on your blog. Even if you choose to use advanced technology to simplify your blogging process, use your brain because artificial intelligence doesn’t have one. Even when you’re dealing with writer’s block or lack of research skills, always pay attention to what’s there in your post.
“AI won‘t be fool proof in the future since it will only as good as the data and information that we give it to learn. It could be the case that simple elementary tricks could fool the AI algorithm and it may serve a complete waste of output as a result.”
― Zoltan Andrejkovics, Together: AI and Human. On The Same Side.
Personalised content
Before the arrival of artificial intelligence, content personalisation could be a challenge. We live in a global world, and we have people who speak different languages, have different user behaviour patterns and pride in their different preferences. Though you’re expected to have a target audience as a blogger, how do you create content for all kinds of people within that category? Even with all the information in the world available to you, you need to curate your content according to the language, values and messaging of each demographic. All of that is resource-heavy, time-consuming and mentally exhausting.
Artificial intelligence in blogging lets you create a one-on-one content strategy, such as recommendations, networking and social media algorithms. All you, the human being, need to do is to feed the target audience details to your platform. This includes people from all industries, ages and gender nations, communication styles, subject preferences and objectives, terminology and much more. Then, you feed it the content that needs to be personalised according to the target audience — which in this are blog posts. If you don’t want to spend your time reworking your content, this is what AI does.
Cost-efficient
People might agree that having blog posts written by writers can be expensive, especially if they don’t have the bandwidth to collaborate with them. Human writers often specialise in certain niches or industries and charge for their expertise, which I believe is quite valid. After all, they have dedicated years or decades to honing their literary talent, and nobody wants to work for peanuts. If your brand solely depends upon written content such as blogs, white papers and case studies, it’s always recommended to contact writers who specialise in those departments. When they charge high or low, they promise and deliver quality.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence can be undoubtedly inexpensive. I believe that they’re more suitable for brands that don’t require quality content. While human writers must be paid a premium, I don’t believe that AI platforms genuinely care about money. Instead of paying for something that the brand can do well without, they prefer to redirect their expenditure towards product launches or marketing campaigns that bring them more leads and targets. It can be suitable for brands that want quick and easy content while remaining productive, cost-effective and fairly accurate. I mean, different strokes for different folks.
“As more and more artificial intelligence is entering into the world, more and more emotional intelligence must enter into leadership.”
― Amit Ray, Mindfulness Meditation for Corporate Leadership and Management
Suggests improvements
One of the things that I like about artificial intelligence is that it does tell us how short our attention spans are, and how we end up making mistakes simply because we know that AI is going to handle it. For example, I have to constantly switch between American English for work and British/Indian English for passion projects. To be honest, it can be quite cumbersome working through the ‘s’ and ‘z’, ‘-our’ and ‘-or’ and the Oxford comma. Sometimes, you need to get the work done and that’s where these platforms help you with the context and localisation that I talked about in the third content. It makes life easier, in a way.
We might not even sometimes realise but AI blogging platforms do help with spelling, punctuation and rephrasing sentences. We’re human beings after all, and we do make mistakes. Some extremely talented and perceptive writers today still like to steer away from AI and read their work aloud. They may even use voice-reading software to listen to their content being read aloud and make changes accordingly. Does everyone have the time and patience for it? Not me, but then I see the benefits of editing your content by yourself. It makes you more mindful of what you write and does not make you depend on software to correct your work.
Is artificial intelligence good for the writing industry, well, indeed, it’s a difficult question to answer. Some people like to stick to the traditional methods of writing, while others are more receptive to modern technology. I fall somewhere in the middle, using software to correct any mistakes (I genuinely don’t have the patience to read through everything I write), but without losing the human touch. I believe that what differentiates AI-generated content from human-written content is the Midas touch, which sprinkles emotions, opinions and nuance into writing. So, are you in Team Human or Team AI? Let me know!
