Content Writing: Why It Needs The Human Touch

22 Jan 2024

Published in: Member News

---

While AI tools like ChatGPT can generate articles and social content efficiently, they lack a broader understanding of the content's big picture, making it challenging to capture the essence of human creativity and strategic thinking. 

---

A comprehensive content plan once required substantial time to write all blogs and content yourself or a significant budget to pay someone else to do it.

Now, you only need to create an account on ChatGPT, ask it to do the work for you, and pump out infinite articles. Right?

Not exactly. Content writing is more than the sum of components. A piece of writing produced by AI might tick all the boxes in theory, but without that human touch, it just doesn’t meet the mark.

Bigger-picture understanding

Tools like ChatGPT are large language models (LLMs), meaning they work by interpreting any request you give them as a sequence of characters and deciding which sequence should come next based on all the data they’ve been fed.

You might feel like you’re getting an answer to your question or a tailor-made blog post, but the reality is that the AI is simply performing statistical analysis to know what output it should give based on your input. This doesn’t necessarily mean that AI can’t perform high-level analysis or do creative work, as some claim. But it does mean AI struggles to see the big picture of your work. Meanwhile, humans are masters of this.

Correct doesn’t equal captivating

If there’s one area where AI beats humans, it would probably be spelling and grammar. Even the most erudite, meticulous human writer is guilty of making a typo from time to time, yet it’s very rare to catch an AI tool doing this.

But does that mean that AI is a better writer?

Absolutely not. In fact, AI’s insistence to rigidly stick to grammar rules is often what makes its writing lack the playfulness and light touch of human writers. Correct does not good content make.

And as a side note, AI isn’t correct about everything — it might be a dab-hand at grammar, but it often gets confused about its information, with OpenAI admitting that ChatGPT sometimes makes up facts.

No more generic phrasing

When you first discovered the wonders of AI tools for writing, you may have marvelled at what it could come up with and how well it wrote. But most people who continued to use AI realised the same thing: AI was repeating the same phrases time and time again.

This results in tell-tale signs to those in the know that you’re relying on AI, which creates mistrust with your audience and stops them from taking you seriously. How is anyone supposed to believe that you’re an expert in your field if you can’t even be bothered to write your own content?

And even if they don’t realise you’re using AI, they’re likely to pick up on how unauthentic and stale the wording is.

What’s next? Figuring out your content strategy can be overwhelming, but we’re here to help at The Unda Dog. As business marketing professionals, we know how important it is to make content that really connects with your audience — without resorting to AI.

We can write weekly blogs for you, along with other social media management services. Contact us to find out more about our packages and how we can help you