First of all, I love writing. I love the research that comes with writing about a topic, pulling out all the relevant facts and figures and I love putting pen to paper (well, fingertips to keyboard – doesn’t quite have the same ring about it, does it?)

If I used AI, I wouldn’t get the same level of satisfaction.

But do my clients really care that I love writing? I think they do, otherwise they would choose to use AI and not a real person, right?

In my opinion, there’s no better tool than your brain and its ability to be creative.
Can you teach creativity to AI, I’m not sure you can… at least not yet. And isn’t that a terrifying thought.

The wonderful thing about humans is that our brains all work differently, and we all perceive and experience the world differently which is why we have the amazing ability to be creative.

Sure, AI can generate ideas for you, but your brain is also capable of coming up with ideas, if you just use it! And they’re probably better and more unexpected than the ones AI can generate for you.

As a side note, one of my biggest concerns with AI is that we stop using our brains and rely on computers to do things for us, what becomes of us when that happens?

Will it impact our ability to tell stories, our memory, our relationships?

Already, when we can’t remember things, we’ll just say ‘I’ll Google it’.

I’ve tried a few different AI Content Writing apps and websites in the past including Jasper and ChatGPT and overall, I still think AI struggles with tone of voice which is a hugely important part of content writing.

Whilst you can select some basic tones like ‘Formal’ or ‘Conversational’, I still don’t think it can quite get the nuance right.

It can be too conversational or too formal and the choice of words can be a little odd sometimes too.

If you’re looking for idea generation, sure it can come up with a list of topics but if someone else puts the same prompt in, are you going to end up with the same topics as someone else?

If we all start using AI, will the internet be full of the same articles just churned out slightly differently?

As humans, we can put a spin on things, write blogs from a unique angle which leads me nicely onto my next point…

This ties almost all my above points together. The biggest reason I don’t use AI is that you can still tell it’s written by a robot and not a human because it lacks emotion and dare I say… intelligence?

It’s not able to give your thoughts on the matter, it doesn’t consider things or give it thought – we all have an opinion and that’s another thing that makes humanity both brilliant and awful.

I think it’s difficult for AI to generate emotion in blogs, and often doesn’t make you feel anything, it’s a bit like reading from a really dry textbook.

If that’s the type of content you’re going for, then great.

But when we tell stories and weave emotion into it, we feel things and we remember and we want to tell others about it.

To write a comprehensive article, you need to be able to prompt AI accurately.

If you don’t know how to structure your article, without relevant headings or themes, it does tend to regurgitate the same content just in a slightly different way.

At the moment, you really need to understand the topic you want to write about and what you want the blog to cover to be able to brief the AI properly.

And then when you go to that effort, you may as well write the article yourself.

This may not always be the case, as the machine learning kicks in and more people use it, perhaps this will improve in time, but I do think an essential skill is understanding how best to brief AI to get the results you’re after.