Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Content Writing

“Robots! They are supposed to be our faithful servants!”

This is one of Chandler Bing’s most popular sarcastic phrases. And while we are still far away from having robots serve us all the time, the irony in his words starts to kick in as we see how many human roles in various industries get automated. 

Content writers and people who work in creative professions, in general, weren’t considered to be under this threat. People usually think that robots can’t think creatively and, although they may know how to put words together in the right grammatical order, they will hardly be able to write an article. 

This was true until the robot wrote an article for The Guardian this year. 

The newspaper asked the robot called GPT-3, a new language generator from OpenAI, to write an essay from scratch. The editor’s note under the essay says that the robot produced eight different 500-word essays. Each of them was unique and offered advanced arguments based on facts. 

But the most interesting question is, did The Guardian post this essay without editing?

Of course, not. The final result that ended up on the website was a compilation of phrases and sentences from all eight essays. The robot’s essays still lacked the natural flow of the narrative. And, even though it is easy to read, it still seems robotic, no pun intended. 

Surely, GPT-3 showed an amazing result. But it’s still far away from what humans are capable of in content writing. 

However, such advancements in artificial intelligence still make you wonder about the impact that AI already has on content writing and how humans can benefit from it. 

Let’s take a look. 

1. Personalizing Your Content 

Personalization has always been a big problem for brands when it came to creating content. After all, how can you get into your customers’ heads and read their thoughts about what they want and don’t want to see from you?

Such predictions became possible with artificial intelligence and machine learning, in particular. Machine learning can collect data points from your website visitors and track their behaviors on different pages. You can later use this information to define their content preferences and focus on them when writing your content. 

There are also tools online that you can use to generate content topics that would fit your audience’s interests. For example, in Scoop.it, you can enter the keywords, which your target audience often uses to search for content within your niche, and the tool will generate personalized content ideas for you:

Personalization is very important for lead generation and conversion, and the more precise your predictions about your audience’s content preferences are, the better content you will be able to produce. 

However, when it comes to using AI to improve the personalization of your content, don’t focus only on one channel that provides data on consumer behavior. Rather, employ all the assets you have – your website, data from chatbots, campaign analytics tools, etc. These assets also use machine learning to identify behavioral patterns, but only using them together will give you a clearer idea of how to personalize your content the right way.

2. Making Content Research More Precise

Every content writer will confirm that more time goes into researching a topic than into writing an article. This is true and is especially relevant when a content writer is asked to create something they don’t have much experience in. 

This is another good case of artificial intelligence application, as it can also be of great help for content writers and speed up the research process significantly. In that regard, artificial intelligence can be helpful in every stage of research:

• determining the topic
• collecting general insights on the topic
• finding evidentiary support

Let’s take a closer look. 

When looking for a topic, content writers have to check what’s currently trending in the respective industry. Normally, it would take a writer several hours or even days to determine whether the topic is trending and which resources are writing about it. 

However, today, all you have to do is to go on Google Trends, insert a keyword for your topic, and check, whether the internet users are still interested in it:

You can also check the topic’s performance according to a certain location, view engagement within a certain timeframe, and even get article ideas from related topics and queries. 

Some tools, like BuzzSumo, can also help you check, which articles on the topic of your interest are currently trending, and how well they perform in terms of social shares:

As a result, content writers will have more understanding of the topic and where it stands compared to similar ones within one niche. 

3. Speeding Up the Process of Content Writing

You can’t talk about artificial intelligence in content writing and not mention the AI-powered tools that can make the process of writing significantly faster. 

The insiders know how much time goes into creating a decent piece of content. After research, you need to create an outline, add points supporting your claims, write the draft, and then edit and proofread it, which, in fact, takes more time than you think. 

That’s why, whether they work for a college paper writing service or create commercial blog posts, content writers can employ editing and proofreading tools like Grammarly and Hemingway App. These tools use machine learning and NLP to identify grammatical and spelling mistakes and also help improve text readability. 

It is also worth mentioning that, even though these tools can significantly help speed up the process of writing, they still make mistakes. Sometimes, when you use Grammarly, it can determine the article style as not engaging if the vocabulary in it is not diverse enough. The tool ignores the phenomenon of the writer’s style, and this is something that artificial intelligence will probably never be able to take into account. 

Wrapping Up

Of course, artificial intelligence is still in its early stages of development, and we still have a long way to go until we get something similar to a robot that thinks, speaks, and writes like a human. In fact, there is no evidence that it will happen in the foreseeable future at all. 

However, you can’t deny the advantages that artificial intelligence has already brought to content writing. It significantly simplified the process of research, made writing itself more efficient, and, thanks to machine learning, we can also detect trendy topics faster. 

No one knows, what the future holds, but there is no doubt that we need to learn how to appreciate AI already today. Although it may never replace content writers, it will definitely be an inalienable part of content creation.