The Problem with AI Generated Content
The problem with AI-generated blog posts or essays isn’t that people can tell they’re generated by AI (people can).
It’s also not that they’re intellectually lazy (although I think it is).
It’s that they’re unoriginal.
Many times, unoriginal is fine.
For example, restating the facts about a high school football game, listing the latest property transfers, talking about voting polling, or rewriting a press release to be shorter.
Not everything needs to be Pulitzer Prize worthy.
News outlets, for example, should be (and are) using generative AI to produce content already. Certain informational content is more than fine to be generated by AI and consumed by humans, assuming that the information is accurate.
Many times, however, and especially in a B2B context, AI-generated content is unoriginal.
If you can figure out how to prompt-engineer your way to a good blog post or essay, so can others.
Beyond that, generative AI, in large part, restates what it already knows and has read. It’s not inventing new, it’s, instead, pattern-matching against the old.
At the risk of a broad oversimplification, it’s taking your situation or set of criteria, pattern-matching it to all the data it’s been trained on, and it’s placing your criteria on its old patterns.
The best essays are the original ones. If your business is B2B or depends on building relationships with your customers, this is crucial.
Your blog posts, essays, and other content is a reflection of what matters to you and why it matters. they’re a first layer of relationship building between you and your future clients.
AI generated content isn’t original, and it’s not really a reflection of what matters to you and why it matters. It’s a restating of what matters to you, but in someone else’s words, cadence, and structure.
AI-repackaging original blog content into shorter-form posts is a spectacular use case.
AI slicing your videos and cutting them into short form.
AI taking your essays or blog posts and creating social media hooks.
AI aggregating your content together to feed your email funnel.
All wonderful use cases.
The difference is where the content originates
When the AI creates the content, the AI is the content creator. It’s making sense of the ideas and nuance.
When the human creates the content and the AI repackages the content, it’s taking your original thoughts and ideas and it’s making the content fit your desired delivery method.
I’ve not met many businesses that love their content marketing spend. Most that I know what to reduce it as much as possible.
I think it’s a worthwhile effort.
But it’s important to know where to reduce that spend.
If you reduce the spend on the creation side, you’ll end up as just another company using AI for marketing.
If you reduce spend on the packaging side, you’ll have better ideas than your competition in more places than your competition.
Which brings me to my most important point.
The purpose of any content creation budget is to create an inventory of content for your customers and prospects to consume.
AI can take the cost of creating that inventory to zero. Combined with the fact that it’s virtually free to host the content on the internet, the cost to create and the cost to store this inventory is effectively zero.
For you and for everyone.
In a world where inventory creation and storage costs are zero, it’s no longer inventory that’s scarce. Inventory is abundant.
It’s creativity.