Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize the way we produce and consume content. Indeed, we’ve already begun to see how ChatGPT is taking over certain aspects of content creation, such as generating ideas, writing outlines, and helping with keyword research and supercharging search engine optimization (SEO).
This blog will outline why humans are still a significant element of content creation and how you, as a content creator, can use AI to help your content creation and not replace you.
Why Humans Are Still Needed
It might seem that AI will take over the world, but it’s crucial that humans remain a part of the creative process.
Creativity and Originality
At the moment, AI can only summarize what is already available on the internet; it cannot generate its own ideas. This means that humans still have the upper hand in terms of creativity and originality. In fact, Forbes said that the ability to be creative is what separates humans from machines.
Humans can think outside the box, draw from personal experience, and bring a unique perspective to creating content. They can infuse emotions, humor, and storytelling techniques that the audience resonates with, making the content more engaging.
Contextual Understanding
AI excels at processing huge amounts of data and identifying patterns within that data, but it can’t understand the finer nuances of this information. While contextual AI, which is used in systems like chatbots and virtual assistants, can pick up on some context cues, it doesn’t have the same contextual understanding as a human.
Humans can interpret subtle cues, cultural references, and evolving trends, enabling them to create content for targeted audiences. They can adapt their tone, style, and messaging based on the context, an essential aspect of effective communication.
Quality Assurance
While AI is great for automating certain aspects of content production, humans are vital to ensuring the quality of the content is top-notch. Humans can subjectively evaluate the content, identify errors, and refine the content to meet specific standards. They have subject expertise and will better understand the content’s goal, allowing them to make informed decisions and judgements about what to include and what to leave out.
Furthermore, Google penalizes AI-created content that doesn’t provide relevant and useful information (you can read more about this in our blog about whether AI is bad for SEO). So, it’s vital that humans check that any content meets Google’s requirements before they publish to avoid their hard work going to waste.
Ethical Considerations
AI tools use content already published on the internet as their training source, leading to many creators of both written content and art raising issues about AI infringing upon their copyright. And their fears may not be unjustified because, as Harvard Business Review states, “Generative AI has an intellectual property problem.” This article states that it is not clear whether current copyright laws apply to AI-generated content given how new AI is to the market.
These issues will be resolved, but, until they are, users must be careful not to infringe on copyright laws. Some AI platforms can check for plagiarism, but these cannot always check for copyright infringement, so humans must check that they have the permission of the copyright holder to use that content before they publish.
Bias
Because AI is trained on data from across the internet (including social media), it can perpetuate biases, misinformation, and unethical practices.
LinkedIn released an article on how AI algorithms are perpetuating discrimination and inequality, where it outlines that the AI technology used by some of the biggest global companies has been found to contain biases (e.g., Amazon’s recruiting AI was biased against women and algorithms for Twitter and the US criminal justice system were found to have racial prejudices).
In these instances, it would be vital to identify and correct biases or inaccuracies to ensure the content does not cause harm or offense and that’s currently out of the scope of AI.
Human Connection
Audiences appreciate content that feels genuine and authentic. They tend to steer clear of content that lacks connection, especially in today’s society where loneliness is a growing problem. Machines can’t provide the same emotional connection as humans, and there is growing concern that AI could actually harm human connections, as this article by Medium discusses.
Handing over the entire content creation process to AI may result in content that feels formulaic or lacking in human touch rather than inspiring, motivating, and influential.
Human + AI: How to Work Together
To produce the best type of content, a collaborative approach that leverages the strengths of both AI and humans is ideal. So, how do you work with AI to produce the best quality content?
AI: Generate Ideas and Outlines
AI is great for generating ideas and outlines. An AI generator might suggest an idea that you hadn’t thought of. Using AI to automate the more menial tasks of content production will free you up to focus on the content itself.
Human: Write
Here, your human content creators should take over. You can use AI to write blogs, but, as we’ve mentioned above, there are many issues with doing this. It’s better if you write the blogs yourself.
Human: Fact-Check, Edit, and Proofread
If nothing else, a human must fact-check, edit, and proofread your content. A human is needed to check the content for grammar and punctuation mistakes as well as factual errors or biases that may have been introduced by the AI. If you need help with this, we have several blogs that outline the best process for fact-checking AI-generated content and six tips for editing AI-generated content.
Conclusion
Allowing AI to undertake all aspects of the content creation process leaves you open to several issues. AI is not as creative, original, or emotive as humans, and adding to this are the issues with copyright and bias. By combining AI’s capabilities with human expertise, we can achieve a powerful synergy that leads to high-quality, impactful content.
Editing and proofreading are a vital part of any content production process, but they’re also the most challenging and time-consuming. Why not make use of Proofed’s highly trained and fully managed team of editors? We’ve helped over 1,000 businesses with their content production. We also offer AI-content editing services. If you’re ready to see what we can do for you, schedule a call here.
