Will Content Automation Change the Future?
Writers all around the world rely upon crafting the perfect piece of content to pay their bills. Businesses contact freelancers frequently. Authors spend years writing one novel after another.
Imagine a world where books are sold with the name of robots on the top. Robots write blurbs and blog posts. Robots get credit for writing ad copies. This world may not be a reality, but it could be. Content automation is here. It has the potential to do what content creators have done for years.
How does content automation work in the first place?
Natural language generation generates text from the input that one provides. By using it, a machine can write sentences or paragraphs. For example, GPT-3 can create content similar to the content written by a human. GPT-3 can translate voice messages into many languages and help scientists interpret research papers. (Source: Analytics Insight)
Let’s look at the pros and cons of content automation.
Pros
1. Content automation will benefit marketers
Marketing isn’t possible without content. If you’re a writer or work for a marketing agency, you’ll relate to this statement. Marketers need content for a variety of tasks. For instance, a marketer can write an e-book and offer it for free on a B2B SaaS platform’s website to attract more leads. A marketer may also need to write about new features about a B2B platform on its blog to attract more customers. With content automation, the marketer can save time.
You must judge whether the content that robots generate matches the quality of content that you or your team write. Can content hold any value unless it is of a high level of quality?
2. The need for a human will reduce
Let’s imagine a future where people rely upon content automation. You’ll be sitting in front of your laptop. A 2000-word document (edited) will already be present in front of your eyes. Your task will be to check if the software made any mistakes during the editing process. Once you’ve edited the document, your job’s over. You won’t spend eight hours writing and editing a great blog post.
3. Content automation tools will help format content for different social media channels
Every social media platform has a different word limit. For example, Twitter has a limit of 280 characters, and Instagram has a limit of 2200 characters.
Social media posts must represent a brand’s identity across all social media channels. However, different character limits lead to businesses spending more time editing content for different channels. With content automation, companies can spend more time on other tasks like devising new marketing strategies.
Cons
1. Content may not generate according to a country’s culture
A robot can write. What a robot can’t do is understand the values and culture of each country. For example, one needs to understand the countries that prioritize family values and prioritize independence. Culture affects the behavior of the target audience in a country.
Let’s explain this with the help of an example. For example, a company sells burgers in the United States and India. A robot may write about a burger with ingredients that people in India may not consume. Such a situation can create problems for the company as customers may question whether the company pays attention to their preferences.
2. Content may be unethical
Robots cannot understand laws, such as those related to marketing and advertising products/services. For instance, people consider direct attacks on business competitors unethical. Not adhering to ethics can damage a business’s reputation. This is an outcome that no company wants from its marketing activities.
3. Content-based on personal experiences may not be easy to write
A robot can’t capture someone’s own experiences. It’s also difficult for a robot to write about emotions while generating a piece of content. So, if you’re expecting a robot to express their deep love for their passion, it may be a far-fetched vision. Readers want to read content that relates to them. The question is whether robots can speak about experiences as if they were their own.
4. Machine-generated content may make it difficult for a website to rank for SEO purposes
If you run a company website or have your blog, you surely dream of seeing it on the first page of Google’s search results. Poorly written content with the help of machines may make it hard for content writers to achieve this aim.
Google has a list of quality guidelines that it expects content creators to follow. Google believes that machine-generated content that a human does not review does not provide value to readers.
So, businesses automate the content; they must make some edits before clicking on the publish button.
Conclusion
Content automation is effective only if the data (input) that a human provides to a machine is understood by it. In the current scenario, using humans seems to be a more viable option than relying on robots. Content automation techniques are still being tried and tested.
Will content writers work with a reduced workload in a world with automated content, or will they become redundant? Time will answer this question for us.
