Is Automated Content Better? Let’s Talk About AI Written Content

Artificial Intelligence created content – sounds fancy doesn’t it? It sounds like The Future, capitalized and in flashy lights. The fact is, you’ve probably read AI created content and either not noticed or just thought it was poorly proofread.

Most people who use automated content either don’t need to provide (or care about) valuable content for their readers – for them it’s about ad impressions and data mining. Or if they do want to give their reader a valuable piece of content, they spend significant time and effort correcting the content provided by these bots.

Let’s have a look at the two biggest myths about AI Content Creation:

Quicker only in the sense of getting a first draft in a couple of clicks – but you need to input a lot of information just to get to that point. Then you need to choose between proofreading, editing, adding, and rewriting sections yourself or hiring a professional to do those things for you.

Why?

Because most AI content tools – even the better ones out there – churn out awkward and grammatically chaotic paragraphs that might or might not make sense.

For example, “Ice cream is an sweeter frozen meal that also is typically taken as a delicacy or as a snack or as an treat. It can be made with whipped cream or cows fresh milk and is seasoned with fruit for sweetening purposes strawberries or peaches, in addition to an sweetener like sugar.”
This is a real AI generated sentence from a popular rewriter on the topic of Ice Cream. It might be close to correct – technically – but in terms of grammar and readability it’s far from acceptable.

You can likely see the problem with posting something like that on your website in the hopes of projecting a professional, competent, and trustworthy brand voice.

In addition to sounding unprofessional and needing significant editing, most automated content tools only produce shorter pieces of writing which barely cover the topic. This means that you’ll have to add a good amount of written content to make it worthwhile – which takes time.

If you’re happy with associating incorrect, poorly written, and devaluing content with your company then yes – you can get results like the one above cheaply.

However, if you spend time fixing it or employ a professional to fix it?

Well, consider the time you took to decide the topic, keywords you wanted to include, finding a tool that doesn’t make you worry about upping your virus protection, and then actually generating the post.

Now, add that to the time you’ll spend fixing it!

By the time you’ve done all that you might have written it yourself. You’ve used up an hour or more of your own time which would have been better spent on other aspects of your business.

When you consider how valuable your own time is, what did it really cost you?

For that, you could have paid a professional to write it in the first place.

What about premium tools? Well, if you do want more control over the content created by the tools you’ll need to pay for a subscription or membership fee. These premium tools often let you input a lot more information for the AI to consider which might sound like a win but in reality, it just means spending even more time on this ‘quick solution’…

…and then you’ll still need to spend time reading it before you publish it just to make sure this so called ‘premium content’ isn’t riddled with mistakes.

Google is the premier search engine in the world. Even though others still exist and are used by people daily – Google is the main player.

That means that anyone wanting to attract business through Google needs to care about what Google has to say about Search Engine Optimisation.

Google recently released their Google Essentials and included these choice words about what they don’t like about AI Content.

Hint: they also put these guidelines in the spam section, so that should tell you what they really think of AI Content.

• Negative: content that makes no sense but contains many keywords
• Negative: content translated through automated tools with no human input before publishing
• Negative: content created through automation with no regard for the reader or quality
• Negative: content generated using automated synonymizing or paraphrasing tools
• Negative: content automated with information from data scraping
• Negative: content pieced together from different sources without adding value

So, according to Google, CAN you get away with publishing automated content?

Sure, technically – you just won’t rank well in the results and your potential customers will never see it.

The SEO world changes every day and with more people turning to video for their information and voice search to get there, the world is changing faster than most CEOs and business owners can keep up with.

Especially when they’re busy with other vital aspects of their business likes service delivery, inventory, staffing, and all the everyday activities that go into actually running a company.

Which is where hiring experts whose whole job it is to stay on top of these changes in SEO, search trends, and the practicalities of getting your company seen comes in.

Sure there is – hire a content creator or digital agency who take responsibility for the SEO research, monitoring, writing, editing, posting, and updating of your published content.

Our team at Net Branding curates handwritten, focussed, and valuable content that will not only help you rank in the search results but actually help you convert searchers into customers.

We create Search Engine Optimised content that counts, results in better visibility, and helps the people who see what you publish trust your company.

It might not be as Futuristic as having an AI write your content for you but it sure is the way to get reliable, plagiarism free, and high-quality content you’ll be proud to publish.