AI-Generated Blogs Versus Human-Written Blogs: Part II
The Machine versus The Human.
Are you a sci-fi aficionado?
I watched Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon’s ‘Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya’ recently, a science fiction romantic comedy. Aryan Agnihotri meets Super Intelligent Female Robot Automation (SIFRA) on a trip to Los Angeles and falls in love with her. At the outset, they seem to be a highly compatible couple. As time goes by, Aryan realises that while SIFRA could be the best ‘partner’ for him, she’s not a human being. Despite her human-like looks and behaviour, she will always be a robot and have to be controlled and managed by a human being.
So, is artificial intelligence seriously the all-powerful discovery everyone’s talking about? Living in a digital-first 21st-century world is easy, yet challenging in many ways. Millennials and Gen Z know how to use high-end technology, and AI in blogging seems to be a fairly recent phenomenon. I’ve already talked about this in my previous blog post, and there’s still so much that I don’t know about it. While we know about the several benefits of robots, automation and artificial intelligence, does it replace a human being’s emotions, rationality and thought process?
No human touch
One of the biggest problems with AI in blogging is the lack of a human touch. We’re not writing blog posts for the sake of it, we want to convey something to the people. We want to be of help to our target audience. We want them to relate to us. Though AI can give us a well-researched and detailed article, does that make it a blog post? In the 2000s, blogs were usually owned by a single person. Over time, companies started creating blogs on their website to rank on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and provide in-depth information about their services and products.
You start a blog to connect with your audience, discuss their pain points and find solutions. Much like the movie, AI platforms will give you the solution but won’t have the ‘human connection’ that we’re looking for. Going by a simple example, I remember people making friends with the likes of Google Assistant, Siri and Amazon Echo Dot. They’re extremely useful technologies that are excellent at answering questions and following instructions. However, can you talk to them like you would do with a human being? That’s the difference between an AI platform and a human writer, it doesn’t somehow click.
“Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.”
―Steve Jobs
Can get monotonous
I like to spend more time on LinkedIn, as it connects me to writing experts all over the world. When you read a piece of text, how do you know that it’s been written by a human being or AI? First of all, you’ll notice words that seem out of place. Of course, all of us want to use our finest language when we’re writing something for the public. We want to appear well-read, wise and sophisticated. We want our readers to be inspired, not simply by our ideas but also by our use of language. We want to be all-rounders and teach them, but that’s not what blogging is all about, right?
If you compare AI-written blog posts and human-written blog posts, you’ll notice that the former’s language is unnaturally formal and polished. Let’s be honest, nobody speaks that way unless they are giving a speech. It’s often said to use long-winded and complicated words, none of which are commonly used in everyday conversation. In other words, it does sound ‘robotic’ and ‘mechanical’ after a while to the trained eye. Blogging is not simply about teaching, but it’s more about connecting with like-minded people. AI platforms don’t have feelings, and hence, content written by them doesn’t connect with people.
No originality
The other major problem with AI-generated content is that you don’t get to use your creativity in any way. When you’re writing a blog post, you want it to sound fun and approachable. While you can work on your platform to make it an accurate and richly detailed article, you won’t find the twists and turns of language and human experience in it. You won't find the nuances of what you saw on the way to work, the deep conversation you had with a colleague that taught you a lesson or even the epiphany you had last night about finally starting your business. You won’t find the beauty of the last sentence in an AI-created blog post.
Artificial intelligence gives you the answers, but it doesn’t encourage you to ask new questions. Let’s not forget that much like everything else that we use in a highly advanced technological world, artificial intelligence is also created by a human being. Much like the world before computers, people feared that this box-like machine would take away jobs and turn the world into a hot mess. As it turned out, the millennials and Gen Z still have their jobs. Unlike our older generation, which had hard copies of everything that took up so much space and maintenance, much of our data is on the now slim and sleek mobile device, in our control.
“AI-driven automation will continue to eliminate traditional jobs, but also create new opportunities and industries we can’t even imagine yet.”
— Jensen Huang
Risk of plagiarised content
From what I read on the internet, AI-generated content is generally not slammed as ‘plagiarised’. It collates information from all web sources and generates a completely brand-new content piece for your blog, which I honestly don’t (or can’t) believe, but sure. Chances are that if two people use the same kind of keywords, the AI platform will generate two separate articles that sound similar because they’re probably taking the same websites for reference. I mean, how do you regulate that? How do you know if the content you see is genuine? What if it shows your piece as ‘plagiarised’ on a software?
Based on my experience as a website content writer, I’m too familiar with the concept of plagiarism. Plagiarism refers to copying or paraphrasing the ideas and work of others, often word by word. In my field, using the same three words in the same order can amount to plagiarism. Or, the rules could be stricter than that. Some organisations might be more lenient with plagiarism, others might not. In some cases, you want to attribute some of your content to the particular AI platform you’ve used, especially if it’s done a significant chunk of the research and writing for you. You don’t want to deal with legal consequences later on.
Needs the human mind
As I said, artificial intelligence is a technological advancement made by human beings. No matter how sophisticated and futuristic you make them, they can’t outshine the human brain. I watched Rajnikanth and Aishwarya Rai’s ‘Robot’ a few years ago, which is a Hindi remake of the Tamil movie ‘Enthiran’. Chitti is the protagonist, a robot developed by Dr. Vaseegaran. After a series of events, it starts to develop human emotions, including love for Dr Vaseegaran’s fiancée, Sana. What follows is a battle between human intelligence versus robotic strength that doesn’t have a conscience of its own, and when controlled by negative forces.
Artificial intelligence is probably the most useful invention in the 21st century, but it needs human intervention much more than you think. Though AI platforms can create content using a brief, it doesn't understand context and nuance. Though AI can be used to proofread spelling and punctuation errors that may be missed by the eye, it can’t always recognise code-switching. In other words, it will automatically flag a native word as ‘incorrect’. Though rephrasing sentences might seem correct at face value, it might change the entire context. That’s when a human being must always proofread even after using AI for their piece.
“I think we should all be very worried about what the internet is doing to human relationships, human thought, and our ability to think.”
— Noam Chomsky
Though AI blogging platforms are more suitable for organisations that mostly focus on their services and products, they won’t work as well for content-oriented brands. People don’t want to be simply educated and informed, they want to be connected to the brand as well. If you do want to use artificial intelligence to write your blogs, use it for planning and strategising. If you use AI to write out entire blog posts, is it seriously something that belongs to you? Do what you do best, use AI to add a finishing touch to your writing and hope for the best.
If your writing stands out to people, they’ll forgive a few grammatical errors here and there.
