Introduction
I know what you’re thinking: “Surely getting AI blog writers to write a blog for me is much cheaper and quicker than getting a human writer to do it?” It’s a tempting proposition. And don’t get me wrong, AI-written blogs are great. They’re informative, they’re professional and they’re quick to create. But if you want to give your readers any facts and figures, or if your subject is niche then writing with an AI alone is not going to cut it. Here are six reasons why:
The way you understand your own subject is often not the way that people who do not know the subject understand it
Let’s say that you’re trying to explain something very complicated to a friend. You’ve been working on it for a while, and you think you have it down pat. But when they ask questions or try to understand what you’re saying, they just can’t seem to get it.
This happens all the time with my wife and I—we both work in private business, but she doesn’t know anything about the technical side of things that I do. And yet sometimes when she asks me about why we do something or how it works (especially if I’ve just woken up), I realize that although I thought I had explained myself clearly enough for her to grasp, she really didn’t get it at all.
It’s easy for us as humans to assume that our own understanding of anything is good enough for anyone else who doesn’t know much about our subject matter either. In fact, often times even people who are experts on something don’t really understand how their knowledge applies (or can apply) outside their own domain.
AI is good at compounding this issue, especially if we assume that it understands the direction we want it to go with our copy on niche subjects. In fact, we find that the more niche the subject, the more AI struggles to produce relevant copy and we have to be very specific on which direction we want the story to go. Whereas with more general topics, giving AI more breadth seems to work better.
Machines don’t get human nature
Human nature is what makes you, you. It’s why you do the things that you do and feel how you feel. And it’s also what makes it so hard for machines to understand us. We are full of quirks, irrationalities, and biases that don’t make sense from a purely logical perspective.
AI doesn’t understand human history and culture very well either: AI can’t explain why we value certain things over others (like free speech vs. privacy); or why we behave differently in different situations (like at home vs work); or even why people have different personalities at all!
AI can only learn what it knows, which means it needs us to teach it. We have to give AI the right data so that it can understand our world and ourselves better.
But, as humans, we have a hard time explaining things to each other, let alone to machines. Especially when the things we want to explain are complex and multi-dimensional. That’s why we need AI blog writers: they can help bridge the gap between what we know and how it applies to our lives, as long as we teach it properly.
Stories and analogies are what make content real and relatable
Stories and analogies are powerful tools to help readers understand a topic in depth. They allow you to make your content real and relatable, which also makes it memorable. And choosing which stories and analogies to use depends on where you are in the world. They even differ depending on where you are in the UK. But AI doesn’t know that, and will often try to enrich content with a story that isn’t relevant or is only relevant to a small subsection of readers.
A blog is a conversation between writer and reader, and AI can’t write that way
A blog is a conversation between writer and reader, and AI blog writers can’t write that way. It makes sense for an AI to be able to respond to comments because it’s just one-way communication—the AI has no idea how many comments there will be or what they’ll say, so it doesn’t need any careful consideration before replying. But a blog post is different from those things: it’s two-way. The writer has already put in their thoughts and research into the piece, but now they’re going to have someone else respond back with their own ideas about what was written, or things that were left out of the article entirely.
AI doesn’t understand the flow of time
We created a blog for a customer recently which was broadly based on a software package and whether or not it was suitable for use on Apple devices. When we created the first draft, we noticed that the AI was talking about the “upcoming release” of the iPhone 8. This showed us that it didn’t understand that the iPhone 8 was indeed “upcoming” a few years ago, but that it isn’t anymore.
The flow of time and how information becomes outdated is something we are cautious of with AI-produced content, which is why we choose to include a human editor on every piece of work we produce.
AI blog writing is not as good as human writing.
AI blog writers are not yet as good as human writers, but the leaps forward that we’ve seen over the past 2 years would suggest that it won’t be long until it is on par.
AI can be very good at writing content that is factual and structured, but it struggles to know how to convey a relatable message. AI needs to be trained on the context of a subject, which means understanding what type of information will be relevant for your target audience. It also needs to have an understanding of the tone you want to convey in your articles. For example, if you’re writing about customer service, then you don’t want your AI bot to sound too sarcastic or formal—it should sound like one of your coworkers wrote it!
Conclusion
We are not saying that AI can’t be used for blog writing. Far from it. AI can serve as a valuable tool for writers to get ideas, structure their content more easily, and even make improvements to their written work. But it’s not going to replace humans entirely any time soon—unless you want your blog posts written in the style of “The Shining”.
At Projekt Rising, we use AI extensively to help speed up the creation of all sorts of projects which need copy. However, every single assignment we carry out has an experienced editor watching over it to add those human touches.
If you want to find out more about what AI and Automation can do for your business then give us a call or drop us a message.
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