Can AI Replace Content Writers?
Artificial intelligence. Speak those words, and hackles rise among those wary of being replaced in the workforce. The same is true among content creators, though for the time being, talented writers have no need to worry about automation stealing their gigs.
At least, not as long as our clients are more interested in engaging their audience than they are sucking up to search engines.
I make it a point to not whine about content suppliers I don’t regard as real competition-entry-level writers who jump at $0.05/word jobs, low-quality mills, or overseas ESL content writers-but I came across a hilarious thread on an SEO Reddit sub the other day that inspired me to write about AI-generated content copy.
Scraped Content and Special Ed Squirrels
Here’s the gist of the post and response: A hapless entrepreneur asks if the Reddit sub users — mostly digital marketing and SEO professionals — would be interested in a service that offers content scraped (stolen) and aggregated from other sites for $1 per article. With images. They posted a link to a sample article, but I never followed it; given the writing skills demonstrated by the poster, I don’t think I’d have been all that impressed with their idea of quality content.
A guy from a marketing agency was the first to respond: “No. I wouldn’t use any type of service like this. Because I want my users to see me as an expert in the field, not someone who has the writing ability and reading comprehension of a squirrel with a learning disability.”
I don’t know why this little exchange made me so happy. I mean, come on… I wasn’t worried about digital marketing pros flooding the thread with “OMG, that sounds amazing, I’m all in!” or “Wow, a buck a pop? What a great value!” but it felt good to see that those who did respond seemed insulted they’d been approached with such an offer.
Can AI capture the cultural nuances of business blogging?
Writer Dan Brown said, “The thing that’s going to make artificial intelligence so powerful is its ability to learn, and the way AI learns is to look at human culture.” I’ll forgive him for his poor grammar (and some other stuff) because he raises a good question: Can AI nail down culture well enough to write relatable blog copy?
Artificial intelligence has a way to go before it can engage audiences with genuine empathy.
You can’t personalize your content without a clear understanding of your buyer persona’s cultural background. That’s why I’ve seen so many job posts that include “must be a native English speaker/writer”. There are amazingly talented foreign writers trying to break into the Western content market, but if they aren’t fluent in Western cultural subtleties, they can’t deliver when clients request conversational writing.
Culture isn’t just about ethnicity or geography. Every industry or general interest market has its own subculture that informs buyer personas, and if human intelligence has a tough time reading the room, it’s going to be a while before artificial intelligence can pick up on and communicate cultural nuances.
Who is this anti-squirrel Reddit guy, anyway? His agency serves commercial, industrial, editorial, portrait, and event photographers. He knows that a sports photographer’s blog will read nothing like the content posted on a wedding photographer’s site. Within the latter market segment, traditions greatly influence wedding styles and customer behavior. And let’s not even get into influences such as media, class, personal style, education, and gender identity.
As it happens, I write for a number of North American luxury wedding photographers, and each has their own brand voice and target audiences. I can easily adapt my writing for these clients, but I’d be completely out of my element writing for wedding photographers in India, China, or Japan, even if I did speak the languages.
Maybe I’m naive, but I can’t see AI kicking our butts in this greater global niche, much less its many nano niches.
I know why this fella wouldn’t touch cheap scraped-and-spun content with a ten-foot pole. Professional photography is an investment, and when expensive shoots or once-in-a-lifetime weddings are at stake, the photographer has to come across as friendly, trustworthy, competent, and confident. Their clients want to get to know them as people, and the photographer’s brand voice has to be consistent.
Customers get emotionally involved when they’re spending good money to have someone interpret their artistic vision. Syntax matters when you’re engaging them through content and conversational channels.
Which brings us to “spintax”, the industry term associated with content spinning.
What’s content spinning, and will it hurt my rankings?
For some reason “automated content spinning” makes me think of the Daft Punk duo in a highly-disappointing career switch.
Content spinners are apps, software, or sweatshop writer mills that spit out dozens of variations on a single, reasonably decent piece of content. Spinners barely change the words and phrasing enough to skirt copyright law, and most creatives and academics agree that the results fit the criteria for plagiarism.
If the original post belongs to the party spinning it, its “progeny” may appear in a private blog network (PBN) with backlinks to the original piece. If the original is swiped from a competitor’s blog, the ethical issues are obvious.
Spinning programs run the gamut from cheap and dirty to costly and sophisticated. They can create fairly decent content, but spun articles can lead to legal hot water and (I love this phrase) Google ranking spankings.
“The Panda and Penguin algorithms were specifically designed by Google to detect the sort of fraudulent SEO practices exemplified by content spinning. If you contract with an SEO company that uses content spinning, you’re liable to get smacked with a massive search ranking penalty that could be impossible to recover from.” — Post Modern Marketing
Penalties aside, most spun content is stilted if not grammatically nauseating. It also risks duplicating content and causing pages on a single domain to compete with one another in SERPs.
Even though I have a dog in this fight, and it would be in my best interest to say, “yeah, you definitely need to hire me for 24,000 to 32,000 words each month”, quality beats quantity every time. Besides, I’d probably have to get a prescription for Adderall to uphold my standards at that volume.
My favorite legit AI tools? Copyscape, text-to-speech proofing, and programmable coffeemakers.
At some point in the near future, artificial intelligence might generate palatable, relatable, and valuable content copy. In the meantime, those who want shortcuts are stuck with generic “black hat” artificially-generated blogs that suck.
Original content with trustworthy sources earns high-quality organic backlinks and meaningful conversions. Blogs and site copy tailored to address the buyer persona at the right time with the right message requires empathy and instinct. For businesses trying to establish brand authority, there’s no substitute for good old fashioned quality writing.
Check back with me in five years, though. If I can get high-speed internet outside the matrix, I might have an update.
Originally published at https://www.freshorganiccontent.com.
