AI is the future of content apparently.
A few weeks ago I had an employee who submitted some email copy to me that just seemed off. The assignment was simple, take a podcast that was already produced and repurpose it into written email copy. She’s an experience content writer so I asked her about it.
She told me she had used AI to write it.
Now I’m no Luddite. I love technology. But something didn’t sit right with me and it wasn’t just because the quality of the writing was off. This took me down a deep YouTube rabbit hole.
I watched a whole video of a fairly well-known marketer showing how she could simply input a generic blog post topic and have AI write the full thing for her in less than 10 minutes. And how amazing is that for getting more content out on your ‘channels?’
And I thought “Is that what we’re doing now?”
Has content become so commoditised that we think it’s OK to publish something we put almost zero effort into that was written by a computer and doesn’t even display our unique knowledge?
I actually used AI for a while in 2021 to generate headlines & social media content ideas. In the end, I gave it up because I felt like my mind was being dumbed down every time I used it.
Copying & pasting a headline from an AI tool is a poor substitute for learning the art of writing amazing headlines yourself.
(And maybe my parents said exactly the same thing with calculators & computers & other emerging technology that we now take for granted.)
And so progress marches on. And I assume AI will be the future of content. I can’t imagine we can stop the machine now. I just wonder if I want to be a creator in that kind of future?
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