There is constant pressure for business owners and leaders to do more with less. AI feels like a reasonable solution, particularly for content creation. It’s so tempting to use a low-cost (or even free) tool to instantly create exactly what you need. In mere minutes, you can build an entire library of content for your website, blog, social media accounts or email campaigns. That sounds great, right?
Not exactly.
Where AI Falls Short
For one, AI doesn’t work for you; AI works for everyone who uses it. There’s nothing to stop AI from outputting content for your platforms that is almost indistinguishable from anyone else’s. When everyone uses the same AI platforms to shortcut the creative and physical aspects of writing, the result is the blandification of content.
Quality is one of the casualties that comes with relying solely on AI to ideate, organize and create your content. On the surface, even “AI slop” reads well: it’s organized, grammatically correct and overall proficient. But there is no distinctive prevailing voice, personality or perspective behind the output. This is because AI algorithms are hardwired to default to a safe, middle-of-the-road response based on pattern recognition. The more basic the prompt, the more uninspired the content is, no matter which AI you use. Excellence still requires effort.
Gambling on AI being “good enough” to support your content strategy ignores the reality that, while a machine can fill a page for you, it cannot establish, maintain or protect your brand voice and quality standards. According to the BBC, many organizations that attempted to automate content with AI are now scrambling to hire copywriters to fill roles they previously cut. These stories demonstrate firsthand that impactful content demands human perspective (at least for the time being).
Humans Need to Do the Heavy Lifting (and Thinking)
Now, all of this isn’t to say that AI has no value in the content creation process. Our content team is just one of many that uses AI to support our work. But your results will only be as good as the framework and prompts behind them. Avoiding unoriginality means having a unique brand voice and infusing that identity into each piece of content. This is what we call messaging.
Defining your brand’s messaging is about pinning down what your business stands for and how you want it to come across. You have to do the work of mapping out tone, core values and the specific way you want your audience to feel when they interact with your brand. It is about creating a standard for how you communicate that is so distinct it becomes obvious when a piece of content is missing the mark. Messaging is the soul of your content, and it is the one thing you cannot, or rather, should not leave for AI to create for you.
The Reality of Maintaining Content Standards with AI
AI struggles to commit to your messaging and apply it consistently across your content. If you haven’t hit a wall of frustration with AI, you likely haven’t used it enough to see its limitations. You only feel that tension when you start demanding a higher standard, instead of settling for the first thing AI spits out. I encourage you to play around with AI content for yourself and evaluate the results. By the end of the experiment, I think you’ll see how much human labor is still necessary to maintain a narrative that resonates.
