Content created by AI tools like ChatGPT, SurferSEO, Bard, etc., has taken content-driven marketing by storm. Many industry leaders believe that AI content brings limitless opportunities for businesses, but many others are not as optimistic. They believe AI content is not suitable.
These debates will rage for years to come, but let’s try to get to the bottom of the debate. Is there any merit to both sides of the argument?
That is what we’ll look at in this blog post – analyzing the pros and cons of AI content.
What is AI Content or AI-generated Content?
AI content is the content created using AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Mid Journey, Dall-E, etc. AI-generated content comes in various forms, such as text-based content, images, audio, video, etc.
Diverse businesses are already using AI tools to create and optimize their content to reach wider audiences fast and at affordable investments.
If you are looking to grow your business through content marketing, AI tools can be a huge advantage for you. However, before you adopt AI tools into your marketing efforts, you must understand their benefits and limitations.
Pros of AI-Generated Content
Content creation has always been a challenge for small and large businesses alike. Thanks to AI, they no longer have that challenge. At least not like what it was before because AI helps them create content much faster. Listed are some more benefits of AI content:
Enhanced Productivity
AI content improves productivity by a large margin. You can ideally produce content much faster than using manual techniques.
We can categorize these advantages into the following.
- Create content faster using AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, Dall-E, etc. This moves everything related to content creation in a faster mode.
- Using these AI tools and relevant APIs, you can integrate these tools to automate repetitive content creation tasks.
- These AI tools let you mass-produce content. This is impossible with human writers or content creators.
- Instead of using human writers to create content, businesses can use them to do high-value content tasks like reviewing AI content, editing, and improving it.
- AI tools do not tire like humans do. You can have AI tools run at their capacity for hours without giving them breaks.
Better Content Quality
While not the best example of the advantages of using AI to create content, quality is a major element for businesses that use AI-generated content.
Many AI tools can create images, text-based, and video content with excellent quality.
Here are a few things to consider on the quality:
- AI content enables businesses to put out content with a consistent tone, voice, and formatting. Although this is possible with human creators, using AI is more efficient.
- Human writing may be marred at times with grammar or spelling errors. AI tools do not make such mistakes.
- You can use AI tools to quickly recreate or re-do the content as many times as needed for quality. That is not possible with humans.
Improved Accessibility
The cost of creating quality content has made it less accessible to businesses. However, with AI tools, businesses of all shapes and sizes can now create content for marketing purposes.
Some of the important aspects to keep in mind are:
- AI tools help reduce the cost and other challenges that limit businesses from creating content. It makes content creation accessible to all businesses.
- Using AI content, businesses have more participants to share their knowledge to help their customers and prospects.
- With the support of AI, it is possible to create personalized content to meet the individual needs of different audiences.
Reduced Content Creation Costs
A huge advantage of AI content creation is its lower cost. Creating content has been extremely expensive for businesses. But AI has made it very affordable and quick.
Here are a few elements to consider from a cost perspective:
- AI makes it easy for businesses to create content of any type at a very low cost per piece. This helps even small and mid-size businesses mass produce content cheaply.
- When you have AI to help create content, you still need content strategists in your team. But you can reduce the number of writers, leading to low writer overhead.
- Using AI to create content offers excellent scalability. You can change the scale of content creation quickly based on industry or audience needs.
Cons of AI-generated Content
All the advantages above have made content creation with AI immensely popular in the world. However, using AI to generate content has its limitations.
There are diverse dimensions to the disadvantages, or risks, of creating content with AI.
Here are a few of the most pressing ones:
Lack of Originality
Most people who are against the concept of creating content with AI aptly point out that AI does not create original content. There are no original thoughts or ideas.
They just regurgitate the content that’s already on the internet. Here are a few important things to consider.
- Most pieces of content created using AI are derivative and non-creative. This does not serve the purpose of the content.
- A huge disadvantage of AI content creation tools is that they repeat information instead of new ideas. This makes content similar to what’s existing on other sites.
- AI cannot imitate or use the imagination or the experiences that make human writing valuable to the readers.
Lack of Factual Accuracy
Content hallucination is another challenge that makes content creation risky with AI. Often, AI can come up with false or inaccurate data.
If you rely on AI to create content and do not fact-check, it can lead to various consequences in the future.
Here are a few things to take into account:
- Many AI models, like ChatGPT, Claude AI, etc., tend to produce false information. This can misinform or mislead readers.
- AI content most often does not have a sense of truth, accuracy, or verification. This can put your brand in serious trouble.
Lack of Understanding
AI tools inherently lack understanding of various topics, subjects, and industries. All it does is create content from what’s already available in the field.
Hence, it cannot be used to come up with insightful content that’s value-adding.
Some of the challenges in this regard are:
- AI tools do not have a real comprehension of topics or businesses. Hence, it cannot provide useful content support.
- What most AI tools do is mindlessly generate text without meaning. This is not the best way to help your audience.
- Content that is written or created using AI cannot ensure correct interpretations or nuance, making it subpar and unhelpful to your audience.
Ethical Risks
In addition to the challenges for businesses, AI tools also pose various ethical risks.
Some of them are:
- High potential to automate misinformation cheaply at a huge volume to perpetrate agenda-based narratives.
- AI tools can be used to create false or misleading content that could improperly influence the perspectives of the public.
- Using AI to create content poses accountability challenges around fairness, transparency, and bias.
Should You Use AI-Generated Content?
AI tools are a great way to create content affordably at a massive scale. No one can doubt that, but the question is—should you go for it?
Well, that’s a bit tricky.
Here is what we advise our clients who are looking to use AI content for their businesses.
Use AI Tools – But With Supervision
Creating content without the help of a content writer or strategist can be counterintuitive. You need to use AI tools only as an assistant and not the main content creation method.
Edit AI Content Heavily
Even after creating content, it needs to be checked against various criteria with the help of a subject-matter expert or editor. This will help you ensure value for your readers.
Create A Standard Operating Procedure
Having a written document to fall back on when creating content helps you streamline the content-writing process. This makes it easy for you to ensure its quality and helpfulness to the audience.
Never Rely On AI Content Alone
Using AI tools to create content at scale with no supervision is a recipe for disaster. The aim is to use the tools to craft the first draft. Then, use an expert writer or content strategist to customize it as per your needs.
Conclusion: How Eco York Can Help You
We understand that the lure of creating content using AI is huge for small and mid-size businesses. AI does make content creation accessible for businesses, but there’s more to content creation than just putting together words and pictures.
Your content must help the audience make informed decisions. The benefits of AI content, like speed, affordability, productivity, etc., are good enough. But the limitations, like lack of originality, factual errors, etc., can be a challenge. The best way to use AI for content creation is with the help of a strategy and a supervisor.
That’s what we do at Eco York to help our clients. We’ve delivered some of the best content with unique facts and insights to engage our clients’ audiences.
If you wish to learn more about our AI services, contact our client services team.
