I’m up for AI – don’t get me wrong.
I love using AI for brainstorming, research, ideation, and analysis – that’s it.
I’m not the biggest fan of AI writing tools, not because these AI writing tools are replacing human writers.
Let’s cut to the chase.
The reason is quite simple: it lacks the human factor.
The human perspective comes from a person who has spent years learning through education, earning a living, attending conferences, experiencing life events, and doing other stuff.
How the heck can an AI writing tool (even with all the advanced capabilities) get the same perspective as the person I just explained?
Now, I’ll tell you what price you might be paying for choosing these fancy AI writing tools over human writers.
The hidden price of AI writing tools that most people don’t realize
Let’s take a look at some of the many reasons why I prefer human writing over AI writing:
Regurgitating existing information
Have you ever heard of AI training models? Apparently, the AI tools need tons of information to train their AI models, and sorry to break this to you, but AI can’t learn stuff unless it gets information from other sources.
The point is that whether you’re creating articles from ChatGPT or using any other AI-based writing tool, you’re essentially getting regurgitated information. In other words, you’re not creating something new and fresh. Instead, you’re repackaging content.
Loss of brand voice and authenticity
Brand voice refers to what a company or person stands for or believes in. It doesn’t necessarily mean what a brand sells. In fact, it represents its culture, values, and mission.
If you think an AI writing tool can depict your emotions, passion, and authenticity, then you’re living in a fool’s paradise. AI writing tools could be excellent at fulfilling the given commands, but they can’t think or feel like you do.
When brands heavily rely on AI writers, they start to lose brand voice and authenticity because the words aren’t coming directly from the humans behind the brand.
Risk of inaccuracies and outdated information
Does anyone remember the meme screenshots about Google Overview everyone was sharing on (then) Twitter? The funniest one was, “how many legs does a horse have?” And, it kept answering “six” before it got fixed.
What I’m trying to say is that AI content can have inaccuracies. No wonder most top-tier AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others give a heads-up to the users that their tools can make mistakes.
Hard to build EEAT with AI content
In case you never heard of it, EEAT is an abbreviation for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s Google’s term for explaining how the search giant analyzes websites and ranks them accordingly. In other words, SEO experts take it as a cheat code to establish authority and ranking in the SERP.
My concern, however, is how AI content can help websites establish EEAT when the content isn’t original or fresh. Disagree if you want to, but it’s hard to build EEAT with AI-generated articles.
AI-generated content goes through the editing funnel
Besides sentence structuring and grammar checking, the biggest pain point of AI-generated content is fact-checking. You can’t put out a raw, AI-generated article because you never know what it says.
No wonder ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI is hiring a human content strategist. This LinkedIn post from Ishneet K had me laughing:
Think about this: if ChatGPT needs a human content strategist to manage its content strategy, then who are we to neglect the human workforce for AI?
What’s the takeaway?
The harsh truth about this AI trend is that a vast majority of AI writing tools’ users don’t realize this until they sabotage their SEO growth.
I learned this lesson the hard way as I shut down around six niche websites (that were purely AI-based) after Google decimated their traffic due to AI content.
My two cents on the hidden price of AI writing tools is that bloggers and brands shouldn’t risk their online businesses just to save a couple of hundred dollars for human-written content. Ensure that you’re hiring an experienced content writer to write SEO-friendly, high-quality content for your blog.