AI and Web Content Writing
This article was originally published by Click & Mortar, which has since become part of Tink.
When Robots Learn to Write: AI and Marketing Copywriting
Since the advent of artificial intelligences capable of "writing," many have risen to toll the death knell of human-written content. If software can now churn out a text in a nanosecond on just about any subject under the sun (including the Sun itself), what good is a writer?
We weighed the question and arrived at the following answer: a writer is good for many things. And for essentially the same ones as before AI came along.
Rather than rendering human writing obsolete, artificial intelligence has breathed new purpose into it: producing content that is authentic, verified, interesting, stylish, endowed with an original voice, captivating, high-performing… in short, systematically excelling where robots fail most of the time.
AI for Content Writing: A Tool, Not a Miracle
It was predictable that generative artificial intelligence would be widely adopted to create digital marketing content. Blog posts, web pages, newsletters, and e-books crafted by robots now swarm the Internet.
Obviously, all this content was produced in the blink of an eye, saving its creators time and resources. The problem is that in this domain, quantity often replaces quality. Is there any genuine interest among your audiences for mediocre content? Not among ours, either.
While AI has clear advantages, it's also highly limited. Although most text-generation tools, such as ChatGPT and Jasper, produce fairly convincing results, their weaknesses lie in the small—and not-so-small—details.
1. Lack of Experience
High-quality content requires its writer to have concrete experience with the subject. By organizing information logically, supporting explanations with relevant examples, and drawing original connections between ideas, among other things, a writer manages to captivate their readership.
Yet AI tools, being machines, have absolutely no practical experience in any field whatsoever. Instead, they operate by scraping the depths of the Web and then reorganizing information according to the needs of the moment. In the end, are they anything more than sophisticated plagiarism machines?
2. Voice and Tone
As a brand, having a voice that is distinctly your own is paramount. It's a crucial differentiator that your consumers expect when interacting with your brand. It can be reflected in the lexical field you employ, the ideas you convey, the subjects you choose, your grammatical and syntactical choices, and so on.
Tone, on the other hand, is the general attitude adopted when speaking to a particular audience. These elements—also known as editorial touch—are particularly difficult for AI to emulate. Since they lack a voice of their own, text generators can, with varying degrees of success, adopt a prescribed voice or tone—“be funny while remaining professional”, for example.
But more often than not, the results will come across as mechanical and unconvincing, much like a blind parrot in a glass cage repeating an old joke—whereas a professional writer can effortlessly coax a genuine smile from us while staying perfectly professional.
Ultimately, sacrificing that unique editorial touch for the sake of speed may not be a winning bet, since we lose our voice in the process. Without that distinctive style that our audience recognizes and loves, what sets us apart from our competitors besides a name?
3. Brand Consistency
An important aspect of any brand is the consistency of the messages it conveys. This refers to uniformity in the voice and tone used across your company's communications over a long period of time. The most common way to achieve this is through a style guide that your writers follow scrupulously.
Conversely, by overusing AI to generate your marketing content, it's easy to lose that consistency, since it depends on the very elements listed above—which are very difficult for artificial intelligences to recreate.
The result: even if brand consistency persists in your communications, it will be flat, neutral, bland, and unlikely to captivate your audiences (in other words, robotic—what a surprise!).
4. Illusions of Creativity
The algorithm behind language models like ChatGPT is rooted in the opposite of creativity: predictability.
Indeed, Large Language Models (LLMs) don't write: they assemble logical sequences of words as if they were jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Trained for years to predict the next word in a sentence—much like assembling puzzle pieces by colour—they now build complex texts by following this basic principle.
Although they give the illusion of producing innovative, original content, their very genesis prevents them from doing so. Because of this, many believe that even if artificial intelligences were refined indefinitely, their lack of awareness of the world would forever prevent them from achieving authentic creativity. In other words, the completed puzzle forms a sunset, a puppy, a mountain that the AI will never see, never pet, and never climb.
5. The Environmental Abyss
As is often the case with technological revolutions, lurking behind the glitz and glamour of artificial intelligence is an ecological scourge. Beyond the natural resources used to build the infrastructure supporting AI, it is its daily consumption of drinking water that is alarming.
The amount of "blue gold" required to operate this energy-hungry technology is enough to dampen even the most ardent technophile's enthusiasm. It is precisely to cool data centers—which overheat with activity—that all this water is used: it has been measured that a single conversation with a platform like ChatGPT wastes the equivalent of a 500 ml bottle of water.
And that's not even counting the carbon emissions resulting from powering these gigantic data centers, which can only increase at the same rate as the number of AI users grows. Add to that the mining of rare minerals essential for manufacturing electronic circuits, and you get a cocktail that makes many environmentalists dizzy with concern.
Although no panacea exists for the moment, the watchword with AI seems to be the same as with other polluting activities: moderation.
The Parrot and the Impression of Competence
Have you ever seen a parrot repeat words it has just learned? With what confidence it utters them! With what authority it makes them its own! And yet the parrot doesn't know what it's saying. The same is true of AI, this algorithm-fuelled parrot. And this lack of understanding, though deftly concealed behind overpowered technologies, remains a fundamental Achilles' heel.
Without understanding language—and it never will, since language is rooted in words that refer to a world the robot will never taste—without understanding language, then, text generators are doomed to their fate as parrots. Increasingly convincing, but a parrot nonetheless.
Fact from Fiction
Like any good parrot, text generators will repeat everything they've heard—without bothering to distinguish fact from fiction. Sometimes, they'll even go so far as to make up false information. This phenomenon of "hallucinations" occurs more often than one might think, and should be enough to convince us that any information produced by AI must be double-checked. Knowing this, do we really save as much time as we thought by using it?
The "AI-ization" of the Web
For a long time, we've been witnessing the "Google-ization" of the Internet—this standardization of websites with the avowed aim of ranking highly on Google.
In the same way, we are now experiencing an "AI-ization" of the Web, where megatons of supposedly "optimized" content are produced automatically for search engines—content that is often generic, created solely to drive traffic to a website. Yet search engines are fighting back.
SEO, Text Generation, and Loss of Performance
In direct response to the recent flood of AI-generated content, search engines are penalizing duplicate, low-quality, or simply meaningless content—in other words, precisely what generative AI is likely to produce on the first draft.
These measures are part of Google's efforts to offer its users a version of the Internet brimming with original content that provides genuine added value to its readers. Any content that fails to meet these criteria—"spammy," plagiarized, lacking added value, sloppy, or otherwise devoid of interest for a human audience—is now relegated to the bottom of the rankings by Google's algorithms.
Ironically, by using AI to save a little time, you lose a great deal in terms of performance. Good luck convincing clients that's the right path to take!
The Renewed Importance of Originality
All of this leads us directly to the obvious conclusion: now more than ever, we must be original.
As the web's ultimate arbiter, Google sets rules that, while often somewhat vague, point to a near future in which high-quality content serving a "human" purpose—teaching, informing, educating, guiding—will be systematically better ranked than content produced "on an assembly line."
Perhaps it took a deluge of automated content flooding the web for Google to finally set course toward an iteration of the Internet that rewards content quality above all else. And if such a path is taken, everyone stands to gain.
This gives us, as marketing content creators, a clear mission: to be original, to think outside the box, to innovate, and to create with our audience in mind—to captivate them and provide a memorable experience through emotions that only we know how to trigger.
In the end, the content we publish is a window through which we hope to be seen. Like any window, several tools will help with its installation. AI is one of the tools at the marketing content creator's disposal, but it is far from the only one—much like a carpenter's indispensable hammer, insufficient on its own to build a house.
By installing a window with nothing but hammer blows, you'll save an enormous amount of time. But it'll be time saved installing a cracked window. It may let in a little light, but also the rain and the wind. Ultimately, few people will stop to look through it.
Tink: Your Content Production Partner
Tink specializes in creating content that is impactful, relevant, and effective. Contact us to put these three crucial pillars to work for you and make your brand shine!
