Artificial intelligence is a buzzword that has taken the globe by storm. The market capitalization of the AI market is expected to hit $190 billion by 2025. That is due to the rapid adoption this tech has experienced over the last few years.
We have Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant who take your vocalized commands, answer your vocalized questions and can be configured to do a lot more such as operate a smart home at your command.
Then, we have AI writing assistants in the content creation world. They’re expected to disrupt content creation and copywriting teams in 2022 and beyond. But are they a good thing, and should we be concerned?
What Are AI Writing Assistants?
AI writing assistants are software tools that can generate content automatically given a set of parameters. They automate the process of content creation for specific industries or topics.
How They Work
The job of AI writing assistants is to improve the quality of content by providing ideas, suggestions, samples, and editing suggestions. With AI copywriters, the goal is to write better copies with less time invested in the process.
In most cases, you won’t have to hire a copywriting team and deal with the nuances of the gig economy.
AI writing tools only need a few keywords to create content like a blog post for a specific topic. The entire process of content creation is done and delivered in an instant.
These tools have also been optimized to generate content ideas. AI writing tools are packed with story generators that give ideas for your next screenplay or novel. They can also generate customized content for businesses interested in different types of copies.
Some AI writing assistants are touted to be good at generating emotions, something most machines struggle to get right.
Why You Still Need People
The pitch for AI writing assistants is compelling. You no longer have to worry about hiring the right copywriter, deal with lengthy delivery times, or hefty copywriting prices. You can have your copies delivered faster than instant noodles.
So, why not go for it?
Human Intelligence Vs. AI Intelligence
The reality is human intelligence and creativity are still superior to AI intelligence. We are still several years away from AI intelligence becoming level to human intelligence. AI experts state that there’s only a 50% probability AI intelligence will reach the human level in 45 years.
AI is still a machine programmed to do a certain set of tasks. It cannot think outside the box or “programming” as people can.
The best thing it can do is make your content consistent. However, it would be extremely difficult to get AI writing tools to produce thought leadership content tailored uniquely to your audience and find it interesting all the time.
What about AI writing assistants that can process emotion?
Well, coming up with content ideas based on emotions is not always a great idea. Yes, emotions are a crucial part of content creation. However, it is not about conveying any emotion. You need to convey the right emotion.
Humans have limitless intelligence plus experts and specialists who can produce unmatched leadership content. Moreover, we have superior learning capabilities to deal with an ever-evolving audience, industry, or niche.
AI Still Needs Humans
AI writing assistants are, in reality, using humans in the background to make themselves better at their job. That is because AI, in its current state, cannot think, read minds, or discover emotion or insight.
AI such as Jarvis uses data and algorithms to create content. Under the hood is a database of pre-written content. This includes fictional work from prolific writers that it can pull from and create content.
That brings forth the ugly side of current artificial intelligence. It is not truly intelligent. Jarvis, for instance, works based on human inputs. It functions because humans lead it through the entire process of content creation.
The only difference is that it stores this training pattern for later use without the humans being present to help it function.
The elephant in the room thus becomes originality. Since AI writing assistants are based on data, their material is never truly original.
Essential Human Skills AI Still Lacks
There are reasons why you should still hire the right copywriter or copywriting teams in 2022 over AI writing assistants.
Creativity
There’s no true way of programming creativity into a machine yet. AI will still rely on data. The human brain is lightyears ahead of AI and other natural creatures on that front.
Variation
AI has made great advances in emulating human speech. However, it is still years away from getting natural speech right.
Strong writing avoids repeating the same words, phrases, sentence structures, and sentence lengths. Humans love switching things up. AI still sounds and writes robotic for the most part.
Passion
Emotion is different from sentiment, passion, and commitment that would ooze out of a writer into their creative work. That is what makes readers feel in touch with the soul of whoever wrote a poem, book, article, or any other written content.
This form of indirect interaction is very hard to program in AI.
Empathy
Empathy requires more than an emotional entity. It requires someone to feel the emotions of another party and figuratively put themselves in the other party’s shoes.
Thus, it’s hard for AI writing assistants to express empathy in their writing, a skill only the best human copywriters and content writers can master.
Experience
True experience cannot be equated to a huge database of content data. That’s the same way pictures on Google of exotic places can never amount to traveling there. With no true experience to draw from, AI writing often feels hollow or shallow.
Judgment
Computers make a judgment based on a set of parameters. That’s not how humans develop judgment skills. Human copywriters rely on intuition, knowledge gained from experience, and values to write topics their readers will resonate with.
Copywriters can thus “go with the flow” and write natural content, sometimes not even in the direction the content was supposed to go. We can make these choices as we write. AI is yet to become this intuitive and adaptable.
Human Content Writers Are Here to Stay
Is AI a bad thing? Not necessarily. How it is being employed is the problem. AI should only enhance human work. People and businesses still need human content writers who can write more compelling content and do advanced tasks such as SEO optimization.
AI can only be used as a supplementary to jumpstart ideas, create the first drafts, and reduce production time.