Friend or Foe?: How AI is Transforming Digital Content Creation
How is content marketing leveraging AI? Dive in to discover how AI is reshaping the content marketing ecosystem — the benefits and challenges that come with such transformative technology.
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
Detective Del Spooner: Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a… canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
Sonny: Can you?
This was a dialogue from the 2004 movie “I, Robot” between a cop (Detective Del Spooner) who was prejudiced against robots and a human-like robot (Sonny) who was programmed to help people. Twenty years later, this conversation resonates in several workplaces as AI dramatically revolutionizes the professional landscape, particularly in digital marketing and content creation.
Are AI chatbots a threat to digital marketers? This is a question circulating in the content and marketing ecosystem since the success of Chat GPT. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming the future of work — writers must keep up with the latest trends if they don’t want their content buried in the online grave of unread posts. It’s tempting to believe that LLMs could ultimately render writers obsolete. But is that really the case? Is AI our friend or foe?
Like any ongoing debate, this conversation has two sides. Let’s explore the positive impacts of AI on digital marketing.
1. AI saves time
Probably the greatest value generative AI has provided to digital marketers is the ability to work efficiently and be more productive in less time. Generative AI chatbots like Chat GPT enable writers to create blog posts, emails, essays, and other types of content within minutes. Just ask Chat GPT to make a 5-point article about financial literacy, and voila — you have a rough draft of valuable content. Generative AI excels at analyzing input prompts to deliver human-like responses, drawing on vast datasets and established patterns to meet your specific needs.
Another AI text generation model is Cohere’s Command, which assists with multiple business applications and different use cases to help enterprises streamline their processes. This AI model can draft product descriptions, captions, emails, and articles, which is helpful for writers who are constantly plagued with writer’s block. It can also brainstorm marketing ideas to improve your content strategy framework.
2. AI minimizes error
Powered with advanced algorithms, AI can quickly spot grammar issues, spelling mistakes, and typos. Grammarly is a popular tool that corrects grammar and punctuation errors. It can also improve a text’s cohesion, tone, and word choice by providing writing and editing suggestions. What’s more, it offers plagiarism detection and citation support. With such features, writers can easily detect errors and avoid issues that may compromise content integrity.
3. AI reduces expenses
To rank well on search results, marketers need a solid SEO strategy. However, this can be expensive due to the number of experienced specialists and software tools needed to perform different SEO tasks. AI technology, such as Bing AI, can help revamp a company’s SEO strategy at a lower price. Bing Chat is an AI chatbot that allows users to search for relevant keywords, create content, and analyze competitors for free. This AI tool is also an image generator, which can create digital art based on prompt instructions.
While AI chatbots offer multiple advantages, they may also bring serious issues to your content strategy and data integrity. What are the possible pitfalls of using AI? Let’s take a closer look.
1. AI-generated content raises plagiarism concerns
AI models are trained on data gathered from multiple sources, primarily information that is publicly available on the internet. Since AI-generated content is pulled mostly from SEO-optimized articles, it raises several plagiarism and copyright issues. Search engines, such as Google, may penalize content that is similar to previously published materials.
Without a writer’s personal touch, AI-generated content may struggle to build trust with your target audience. While AI models can produce text on a wide range of topics, they lack the subjectivity, fresh perspectives, and emotional depth unique to humans. Publishing unedited AI-generated content may negatively affect your website’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) score, eventually affecting your Google rankings.
2. AI-generated content lacks consistency
AI technology is not perfect (at least not yet). Thus, it won’t yield quality content consistently. As mentioned, language models are trained hugely on information found online. Since the amount of information available from one topic to another varies, language models may not be able to generate quality content on subjects that lack substantial research.
Moreover, AI chatbots can generate factually inaccurate and unsafe content when they are not trained properly, raising certain ethical and safety issues. In 2023, Microsoft’s Bing Chat was under fire for its sentient, self-anthropomorphic, and harmful comments on top of hallucinations and factually inaccurate information. This calls for a writer’s fact-checking and editing skills when using AI-generated content.
3. AI technology poses privacy and security risks
The rise of AI brings several security concerns and risks. Businesses could face data privacy concerns when using AI that utilizes consumer data, which may jeopardize their contractual obligations towards their users. Furthermore, cyber attackers and other hostile online actors may use AI chatbots to steal data, develop malicious content, create phishing emails, and illegally impersonate a real person’s voice and style. If you’re a marketer who handles sensitive data, relying on insecure AI tools can pose security vulnerabilities to your company and users.
Human–AI Collaboration
The imperfections of AI are mitigated through proper human intervention. Despite their sophisticated systems, LLMs require humans to design and refine prompts to produce optimal outputs. The human mind must be involved in finessing content that is intended for humans.
Human vetting is also necessary to ensure AI platforms generate safe and quality content. Companies like Invisible are working towards keeping LLMs ethical and compliant with company and industry standards. By training LLMs, generative AI can produce quality and accurate content tailored for multiple use cases.
But make no mistake, AI won’t replace human writers. Rather, they make writing more efficient and less boring. Think of it as a reliable assistant for experimenting with new strategies, analyzing data, automating campaigns, and implementing the right content solutions tailored for your readers and market segments. To answer Detective Del Spooner’s question, AI can help writers transform a blank Google document into a compelling content asset.
Bottom Line
The age of AI has begun, and working with LLMs is inevitable. However, using AI alone is an imperfect marketing solution that could bring catastrophic results. Human vetting is still required to personalize content. As more companies invest in this technology, digital marketers must learn to adapt to remain relevant, innovative, and effective. Embracing AI will usher in another era of heightened efficiency and creativity across the digital marketing ecosystem. After all, we write content not for machines but for real humans.
