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Use AI to structure, but write your content yourself

The internet is getting flooded with AI-generated content. For once, creating content has become an easy task, sometimes devoid of any originality and usefulness. And it has raised concerns as such content often lacks nuance, context, and emotional depth.

However, it would be silly if we discredit the AI revolution, instead of making use of it to better our content creation. It is up to us to make the intelligent use of AI to create better content, that is comprehensive and useful.

One of the best ways to use AI to create engaging and valuable content is to use it for creating subheadings that you must include in a piece of content. This will make sure that you are not missing out on creating comprehensive content on any topic. Here, AI can also help you in structuring the content, with similar content grouped together and complementary content added one after another in a logical format.

Power of AI in structuring content

AI tools are exceptional at identifying important themes under a topic. It is particularly useful when you can give the right prompt that asks the tools to create logical outlines for your content. These tools can suggest a hierarchy of subheadings to be included under the topic, so that you don’t overlook important points.

It is like a team of people brainstorming about ideas to include under a heading. Each team member will come up with ideas that others may have overlooked. Thus, you can cover all angles of the topic, without losing out on including important ones, maintaining flow of the content and reducing time spent on staring at a blank page.

For example, I use this technique to create slides while teaching digital marketing subjects to my students. I give a detailed prompt to ChatGPT, explaining the course details, knowledge level of the students, context of the lessons and then the subject I am going to speak about. AI will then give me a structured list of points I need to include in the session. This helps me in ensuring that I am not missing out on any points while I take the session.

Why you must write the content yourself

Google’s stand on AI-generated content is that the search engine won’t penalize it as long as it adheres to Google’s quality guidelines. Therefore, as long as the content is useful and provides value to the readers, the content will get ranked. But my experience shows that when you are in competition with a piece of content created by a human, more often than not, your AI-generated content will lose out.

The reason being content created by humans will have nuance, tone and context across different cultures and industries. When you write a piece of content, you write it from your human experience, which is more valuable to another human that an AI-generated content.

Your content will have empathy and authenticity born out of your experience, which will resonate with your readers. With your industry knowledge and experience, you can create content that enhances credibility. You can also create content adapting to the tone and language of your target audience. When you write your content, it adds depth and originality to it which will improve user experience.

In this regard you must also remember that search engines nowadays give a lot of importance to social factors like testimonials and user reviews. It certainly shows that search engines have realized that humans value experience of another human more than any machine. So, they prioritize content that reflects genuine insights and personal perspectives of humans. All the more the reason to write content yourself rather than depend on AI. (Add to it the importance Google AI overview gives to social discussion websites like Reddit and Quora).

Blending AI and human efforts for best results

While creating content, you get the best results by blending both AI and human efforts. Use AI to create the outline, generate subheadings, structure the logical flow of the content, and to ensure none of the important points are missed. Then use human interference to refine the content based on audience needs and to write the content using real-life examples, insights, brand voice, and empathy.

In this way you can blend machine efficiency provided by AI and your human creativity. With that you will have a comprehensive content that is added with human empathy and insights. Such a piece of content will provide value to your audience, which in turn will have a higher probability of getting ranked high in SERPs.

(You may like to read the blog post, How to create search engine friendly content.)

Conclusion

AI is a great assistant in creating comprehensive content, but the soul of the content must come from you. A piece of content with social proof, written by humans can perform well – both with human readers and search engines.

If you are looking for creating content that resonates with your target audience, contact me.