Copywriters and content marketers can relax.
The robots aren’t taking our jobs…yet.
At least, that’s our verdict after spending the last few months experimenting with AI copywriters.
There is no doubt that more entrepreneurial and marketing types will turn to AI copywriters thanks to the speed and scalability it can offer to anyone’s content marketing and SEO efforts.
An AI copywriter will soon form a valuable part of the toolkit – if it isn’t already – for those producing their content or content for clients.
However, much like the pen itself, the quality of its output will mostly depend on the person operating it, and its widespread use could have some very unwanted repercussions – for both the people and businesses that use AI copywriters and the people consuming the content it spits out.
Here are six honest takeaways from our time playing with AI copywriters.
AI Copywriters Are Factually Inaccurate
Anyone using an AI copywriter must be very careful to check the content it’s spitting out.
Because a lot of what it puts out is just plain wrong.
The more technical your content, the more intricate the detail you’re trying to create, and the more careful you need to be.
We found examples of times when even when we specified a date or a year that we wanted the AI to reference, it still produced copy referencing a different year or date.
Other times it blurted out statistics that could not be verified anywhere.
To be fair, not one of the AI copywriting platforms we used ever claimed that the content it would produce would be completely factually accurate, so it’s not a case of false advertising.
However, it’s clear that the potential for AI copywriters to churn out factually incorrect information and the assumption that many of the people using these platforms are not trained in the art of research, fact-checking or even proofreading, means that a lot of this misinformation could find itself published on the web.
This should be a serious concern not just for those people employing AI-powered copy on their websites, blogs and news sites but for people who are consuming content regularly.
The truth is that AI copy is very hard to spot even to the trained eye, so triple-checking what you read will become an increasingly important skill.
It relies heavily on the quality of the user’s inputs
The accuracy of the copy that comes out of AI Copywriters is only as good and accurate as the input you put in.
What most people don’t realise when they first use an AI Copywriter is that it’s not a magic wand; it’s more like a magnifying glass or a microscope.
It takes whatever information you give, however small, and amplifies it.
This means if your inputs are limited, then so, too, will be the output you receive.
That said, if you’re willing to put in the extra effort to provide detailed instructions for your AI copywriter – such as audience personas, detail about how much research has been carried out on a particular topic area and ideas for headlines – then you can expect to get much more tailored and accurate content.
So, if you’re thinking of using an AI Copywriter, make sure that you take the time to provide as much detail as possible in order for it to produce good copy.
AI Copywriters were a great cure for writer’s block…with a catch
Overall, we were most impressed with how the AI helped us get from a blank screen to a finished first draft.
Not so much because it writes outstanding content but because it at least gets you started.
Most of the AI Copywriters we tried had some handy ‘templates’ too. These covered things like “Blog Title Generators”, “Product Descriptions”, “SEO Metadata”, and “Blog Post Outline”, which all pretty much did what it said on the tin.
These were very handy in at least giving our team a starting point or helping us prepare an outline for an article or a landing page.
The catch was, however, that without any decent SEO research being conducted and fed to the machine, the headlines – whilst catchy or at the very least good enough to spark a better idea from a human – were pretty generic and didn’t take into account the SEO considerations that would otherwise go into planning out your H1 and H2 content for a piece.
Nevertheless, if you’re pumping out content at scale, we could see how having a solid AI copywriting option in the toolkit would help.
The AI’s best work is its creative work
One of the most striking things we noticed when testing out three different AI copywriters was its ability to come up with creative ideas.
For example, we tried a bit of non-fiction writing, and there were certainly some interesting character descriptions and stories that were produced.
It’s also great for writing up analogies or any other content where a bit of creative freedom is encouraged.
Essentially, when it comes to the “fluff” of an article – the stuff that gets you from one key point to the next – it does an okay job. It can certainly help you expand on a thought or give you a starting point to build from.
Even if it doesn’t always hit the mark with respect to the grammatical structure of sentences or the tone of voice you’re after, it’ll get you close to where you’re going.
Any time you save writing is lost triple-checking the content
This was something that wasn’t particularly obvious at the start, but the more we used it and the more mistakes we spotted, the more time we spent checking what we were getting out of the AI copywriters.
All in all?
There was maybe a very slight net gain in terms of overall time saved from starting an article from scratch and doing it the old-fashioned way versus using the AI Copywriter.
It was quicker in most instances in terms of getting a first draft done. We’re sure that if you conducted all the research, you needed to BEFORE you started using the AI Copywriter (IE: you have all the facts, data and references on hand and ready to input into your briefs and to verify the content you receive) then you’d probably get there that bit quicker.
At the end of the day, it’s clear AI Copywriters rely heavily on the ability of their users to thoroughly research and fact-check, which remains a time-consuming task.
The more it writes, the more repetitive it gets
Repetition was a very real issue with the AI Copywriters we used.
In the beginning, everything felt very fresh and new, but over time, as we fed it more and more topics to write about – with some overlap – we started seeing patterns emerge in its writing style.
This made us have to be even more vigilant when editing our content because if it’s not making sense or sounding coherent, chances are that you’ve typed something wrong into the brief, or the AI has undergone content fatigue and simply can’t come up with anything sensible anymore.
On a broader scale, this is all that the AI Copywriter is doing. Taking your input and regurgitating something it has read somewhere else.
There was very little real value in the unedited copy that these machines produced, which is probably why Google is working so hard to clamp down on AI-produced content.
Google wants to ensure its top results deliver on Expertise, Authority and Trust, and the fact is that the unedited AI copy rarely produces that.
It still takes human input to feed the AI an original thought or argument and perfect the content it produces.
The Verdict on AI Copywriting from a real-life human copywriter.
It’s clear that while AI Copywriters don’t pose a threat to human copywriting jobs just yet, they do offer an interesting alternative for anyone looking to get quickly from point A to B in terms of content creation.
It’s certainly not a replacement for highly creative, well-crafted pieces. Still, it does have its place as a tool to help streamline content production who don’t want to get too bogged down in the details and are happy to risk publishing inaccurate information.
As a team of creatives publishing content daily, we can certainly see how it could form part of a wider set of tools employed to streamline production and get things going on those days when the creative juices just aren’t pumping.
However, the fact remains that this AI technology remains incredibly reliant on the quality of the human operating it.
Given all of these tools rely on word-based commands, to get the best out of these platforms, you’re still actually going to have a strong command of the language you are writing in and strong research and fact-checking skills to get the most out of it.
For experienced writers who conduct their research before they type the first word of a piece, AI copywriters will be a valuable part of their tool kit.
For novice writers, AI copywriters might seem like they’re doing a great job and they’ll spit out a lot of words very quickly, but they need to be thoroughly reviewed, edited and checked. Those who publish without taking these steps will undoubtedly publish at scale but may be presenting incorrect information or regurgitated information that adds no value to the overall conversation and therefore is unlikely to be deemed as worthy of ranking over more established original content from your competitors.
At Content Hype, we remain very much in the camp of “Content For People. By People.”
If anything, AI copywriters have only served to highlight the importance of the human element.
No doubt these technologies will continue to improve. Still, if you’re serious about SEO and content marketing that will get you results, you’re going to need to take an active role in the copywriting process or engage a content marketing agency – like Content Hype – that can do that for you.
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