AI is being heavily invested in at the moment, and people often worry if AI will take over various industries, including content marketing. In 2022, we are already seeing some significant AI developments that could contribute to workforce reductions. But am I worried? No. And today, I’ll explain why I don’t think AI will take over content marketing any time soon.
What Is AI Writing?
Artificial intelligence uses machine learning to understand, learn, and perform tasks without human assistance. For example, content writing AI is the same process but focuses on machine-generated content such as blog posts, articles, and other copy forms without a person writing it. Some AI can provide excellent writing, but a human will often review and edit a piece before being published.
Why I don’t think AI will take over Content Marketing
While AI has the potential even now to be used for content marketing, I don’t think it will completely eradicate this industry for decades to come. There are four reasons I believe this, and they fit nicely into four words beginning with the letter C; context, creativity, complexity and cost.
Context
While AI can draw from a vast amount of knowledge via databases, this information is still limited as it does not fully encompass the human experience. Every copywriter and content marketer has their own expertise and knowledge to draw from, which currently includes items from which AI machines have zero knowledge. This is particularly true for local and niche topics where a person on the ground will have a broader reach of expertise than a robot. Local SEO is the best example of this, as a robot cannot consider non-digital information. A local freelance writer will know about events, locations, and sayings specific to an area that are not recorded digitally. Providing additional context to content provides a human touch that AI can’t recreate until everything that happens in this world is digitalised. Which, of course, is an impossible feat.
Creativity
Very similar to the above point, a robot cannot express the same creativity as a human, not yet anyway. The writer’s experiences allow them to create copy that is unique and possibly ‘wrong’, but that’s not a bad thing. Incorrect spelling, grammar, and colloquialism can provide an element of trustworthiness that a grammar fed robot can’t replicate. I’m not saying that you should purposely misspell, but sometimes quirks of language can provide more colour to a piece that engages a user over a straight-laced copy made from AI. Creativity has always been one of the defining features of humankind.
Complexity
AI has vast complexity in its creation and development. Content writing AI can provide the interconnectivity needed for content and a general marketing strategy. When a content, copy or SEO writer is writing, they are not just given a title, and away they go. That title has had a tremendous amount of research behind it.
Content strategists, often the writers, look at a vast array of information to plan content. This includes website traffic, keyword rankings, search volume, past blog engagement, future plans for content, and countless other metrics. After that, the writer researches, writes, choose links, collects stats, and reviews other blogs. It’s then being published and used for social, email, PPC and other collateral. Writing one piece of the quality copy may be fine for AI, but it is just one piece in a jigsaw of the content marketing industry. Unless a robot could be integrated with many different parts of software to collate the data, it cannot currently deal with the complexity of content marketing strategies.
Cost
As with all tech, the further developed it is, the more likely the cost is to come down. It’s reasonable to assume that AI will also become more affordable than it currently is. There are free, simple writing tools that are based on the same principles even now. However, just because the simple act of writing may become cheap doesn’t mean there are no other cost implications. As with the section above, to really replace a content marketer, AI would need to do all the above. This is currently not possible, and if it was, it would likely be a costly service, to begin with. Even with a free or cheap AI writer, a human content strategist would still need to be employed to develop what the AI should write about.
Ethical Marketing Education
I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you’re a content writer like myself, you may feel assured your job is safe…for now. If you like learning about ethical marketing, tech developments and inclusive digital work, check out the rest of the Middleton Marketing blog.