No one can predict how AI development will continue in the next ten years. Odds are, you’re already equal parts tired and excited hearing about it. Many businesses have started to integrate AI utilities into their products and workflow, the most visible example that of Microsoft’s Copolit package, which is increasingly integrated in its software and possibly hardware offerings to come.
It’s also true that in the content marketing space, many businesses are choosing to rely on AI. That’s in no way a moral failing of course, business leaders get to choose which tools they use to maximize value, productivity, and their overall marketing approach.
Yet, at least as of the time of this writing, human copywriters are much more reliable, focused, and nuanced than their AI counterparts. While it’s true that general lower-to-mid-level copywriting may severely reduce in demand before the decade is out, for now, using these professional services as a first port of call is wise.
Now, the words you’re reading here have been, for better or worse, arduously typed by human fingers. As such, some implicit bias remains. For fun, you might copy and paste them into an AI utility like ChatGPT and ask for counterpoints to every argument raised. Is it likely an AI would tell you to do that unprovoked?
In this post, we’ll explore why human copywriters edge out AI, at least for now, and why they should remain an intrinsic element of your marketing approach.
Emotional Nuance & Perspective
AI text-generating tools can indeed offer the tone of voice you’re looking for, provided you utilize careful prompting and make revisions. Moreover, you can always re-edit that content to reframe its substance to your perspective.
Yet the stark truth is that no AI predictive text tool can offer the depth of experience and perspective that a human can. For example, the conciliatory understanding that yes, articles like this might be written with AI in the future, and the light fun we’re poking at ourselves for even admitting it, rings more true to the human mind.
When your marketing message is all about relatability, understanding modern lifestyles, and soothing the pain points of your target market, having that kind of raw connective appeal is priceless. In the future, marketing will be prized on how human and raw it is, compared to how smoothly it may be packaged.
SEO Implementation Is Key
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential element of any content marketing plan. As of the moment, AI content can certainly rank on Google provided it’s informative and carefully presented.
Yet as we develop into the future, you can bet search engine utilities will focus more on human perspectives, offering a balance between immediate summaries offered by AI tools, to more in-depth perspectives offered and balanced by the human touch.
As such, industry-leading services like Joliet SEO will focus on curating and ranking human-led content at least for the time being, simply because it’s the most reliable, dependable, authentic, and value-rich. Moreover, it’s not just about the content that ranks, but how that content performs when it does rank. There’s no point proudly standing at the #1 return result of Google’s SERP if none of your leads convert to sales.
As such, considering the entire content pipeline and its function will remain essential going forward, even when AI is ubiquitous.
Compelling & Unique Problem-Solving Solutions
Have you ever encountered a difficult problem with tech? Perhaps your CMS wasn’t working as expected, or you had to learn a new feature. Perhaps you were experiencing a unique bug with a new software framework you’ve integrated into your firm.
You search and search, peruse the manual, and contact support. Then, before you look further, you notice a singular blog post or video published by someone who had the same issue and found a dependable workaround.
This is just a hypothetical example, but it shows a unique flaw with AI – current LLMs are designed to predict the most common answers, solutions, and responses. Sometimes, those won’t apply to your situation as that bespoke offering had. As you can see, if you’re hoping to provide that unique value to your clients through insight published on your blog, videos published to your channel, or social media posts carefully curated, often it’s the nuanced option that grants you insight over your competitor.
Ultimately, AI cannot provide one perfect, unique, and intelligent example to one user, and then another perfect non-replicable provision to another. In that respect, your marketing and content outreach will begin to blend into the same indistinguishable mush as those you’re competing against. If marketing is in the interest of standing out, it’s not hard to see the downsides of implementing that strategy.
Speaking with Authenticity
The text an AI utility generates isn’t necessarily inauthentic, as those tools use predictive tools to guess what the most likely word, in sequential order, will be for answering a full request. These predictive capabilities won’t present themselves from a vacuum, it’s based on the data sets trained on, ultimately authored by humans.
But there’s a real sense of authenticity that comes from the little mistakes, cultural reference points, unique vision and perspective, and even incomplete offerings a human can grant you. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” This is because even if said lion understood English, his cultural reference points would be so off-base that we’d have no framework to grasp them with.
AI is similar, except operating from the opposite side of the spectrum. AI almost always provides the most common and popular answers, so much so that all nuance and minor intricacy are lost. That’s good for simple truths, but the insight hidden beneath such perspectives will be constrained.
In contrast, a human copywriter, especially if they’re penning content for a local audience, will be more precise, understandable, and coherent to your chosen market. As a brand hoping to use marketing to make your firm more exciting, relatable, and yes, unique, these professionals will remain the superior option.
While this post has been written with obvious bias, we hope it provides food for thought and helps you consider how to blend both AI and human content writing into your marketing strategy.
