Thoughts on AI Writing From a Recovering Content Marketer

I’m gearing up for the launch of a fiction business in the next year or so, and I’ve been thinking about how we might reach our target audience. We’re intending to sell content directly from our own website, which has the advantage of not relying on a vast, retail-killing online monster to sell our stories, and the disadvantage that we won’t benefit from that monster’s enormous reach.

As part of my preparations for this endeavour, I’ve returned to LinkIn and I’ve tried to connect to a few more writers - since my connections are very much skewed in the direction of recruitment and marketing, which are, respectively, where I used to live and what I used to do - and since my return I’ve noticed that the place seems to have fallen in love with AI writing.

The contrast with Blue Sky is striking; there, my contacts are almost all creative and the use of “AI slop” is seen by many as an unforgivable betrayal. As a matter of interest, any business that relies in any way on the good will of creative people should take note of this. The use of AI tools - for anything at all - is the best way to turn writers and artists against you, and you will not be easily forgiven.

On LinkedIn, though, even those who are arguing the need for human writers are careful to first explain that “AI tools are useful and powerful”. I suspect that at least some of this is a clever political strategy, as content writers try to explain the value of their work without alienating potential clients who already use AI.

It should probably not be a surprise that the moral concerns of my Blue Sky bubble - copyright infringement, energy use, control by and for billionaire assholes - don’t even get a mention on LinkedIn. It’s more surprising that everyone has accepted AI writing as effective. So, since I no longer write for anyone else, I don’t need to care about melting any snowflake’s feelings, and this is probably the last time I’m going to write or think about business writing in this way, here are my thoughts about AI-written content.

If you’re not a professional writer and you would have written the content yourself, a carefully handled AI tool is probably good enough. However, as a recovering content marketer, I’m of the opinion that most of this type of content probably didn’t need to be written in the first place. This is the stuff that’s there just because you needed content - the daily LinkedIn post that you’re hoping will help you game the algorithm, or the web page you’ve been told needs to be there “for SEO”. If content doesn’t to be great, I don’t think you really need it - but I accept that this is an unpopular and niche opinion and I’m willing to pass by the idea that waffle is better than silence with just the bare minimum of side-eye.

The discourse about AI writing, at least outside my Blue Sky bubble, seems to centre on whether readers can spot that it was written by AI, and I think this rather misses the point. The question isn’t whether it looks like a human wrote it, but whether it does the job you need it to do.

The vast majority of business writing, like anything else your business pays for, has a specific job to do and mostly that means connecting with your audience in a way that affects their behaviour and helps you stand out. If you’re a confident and articulate communicator, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing you can do this on your own - and if you don’t understand the need for a specialist writer, it’s easy to see why you might think you can wrestle effective writing out of a glorified predictive text machine.

For the avoidance of doubt I can almost promise you - unless you’re one of a very few truly exceptional people - that you can’t write effective content without at least the involvement of a professional writer, and I’m afraid there’s no way the predictive text machine can do it for you. The best it can do is fool you into thinking the result is “good enough” - which I’m afraid in most cases is nowhere near good enough.

This was an issue long before the advent of AI. Writing is a complex and nuanced art, and it’s routinely misunderstood and undervalued. The clear and accurate passage of information is only a small part of it - effective content must also create an emotional response in the reader, and that is difficult for an amateur to reliably achieve and control, particularly in the context of business writing, where the reader came for information and does not expect to be entertained. The difference between effective and ineffective content is, by design, often difficult for non-writers to spot - and you’re unlikely to attribute your disappointing numbers to a deficiency you didn’t notice.

For example, you might want a piece of writing to encourage target readers to trust your expertise, or feel curiosity about your product. Maybe you want them to be excited about an event, or reassure them that their problem can be solved. Your content needs to use word-choice, rhythm and sentence structure, as well as the subject matter itself to achieve the desired effect, and if it’s easy to see what you’re doing it can feel manipulative and it probably won’t work. In most cases, content that fails at this will be worse than useless, and your AI tool  - and indeed most non-specialist human writers - will certainly fail.

I will admit to knowing one person who isn’t a specialist and is able to write at this level, and even this amazing lady still works with professional writers; lesser mortals will definitely need to hire someone - or find another way to make these connections.

So yes, I will concede that AI tools can be used to create content that looks like it was written by a human, but I also think that’s completely beside the point - an irrelevant party trick at best, and more often a dangerous and expensive trap. I respectfully suggest that what most businesses really need is content that feels like it was written by a writer - and, at the time of writing at least, there’s only one way to get that.