Using AI to Build Satisfying Content the Right Way

The worst thing you can do for you, your business, your firm, your organization or your team is to leverage AI output directly in your work. Think of it as printing out a Wikipedia page and turning it in as your homework, it’s not too dissimilar. Computers are only as smart as their creators, meaning in this scenario that the content generated by an AI is only as well developed as the source of its training. Considering the training involves non- authoritative sources mixed in along with social media, you can quickly see why it’s actually more dangerous to use AI content directly than turning in a photocopy of an encyclopedia page and calling it done.

That’s not to say that AI isn’t a powerhouse of productivity. You can leverage AI in so many fantastical ways that make writing content more exciting than it likely ever has before. The drudgery can be removed and replaced with efficient processes and data gathering, organization, analysis and summary comes through as if you had flexible just the right size team that you can delegate monotonous chores to.

Why Not Just Publish AI Content?

In the same sense, why wouldn’t the reader of your content just go to the source? What value are you adding other than your prompt wizardry when you directly publish AI content? There’s no value you can add by just prompting the AI to generate content, no matter how creative the prompt is. You could just as easily work with many of the bot marketplaces and just offer your prompt there. Throughout 2023, Poe offered the ability for users to create bots based on their prompts (or even linking multiple bots together). They eventually offered the ability to monetize these bots; a much better value than just reading what you generated.

Likewise, as previously noted, the content generated is and will always be inaccurate. The AI isn’t live on the scene, actively using the latest update of the software or playing the latest games released. It’s sitting on top of the web scraping content, adding it to its lexicon that incrementally is released over time.

As the technology has grown and advanced it has yet to show any increase in its ability to provide satisfying topical content. Plugins, feeding it live data, etc. only go so far.

If you publish mediocre content then you’re just going to have no one really read, link or give your page or site any authority. On top of any kind of punishment if its detected or assumed to be AI (not to mention repetition with other sites publishing AI content on the same topic).

How Does AI Play Into Content Strategy?

That’s not to say AI isn’t very powerful, it just can’t be the author of your content. It’s not even a co-creator, in the sense that it gives it authority in decision making. It’s more of a team member with multiple assigned jobs from assistant to editor. Let’s start with a simple idea: you want to write a sales presentation for a new product.

Using Bing AI, within the Edge browser, you can have it gather market research which you can then review its sources and gather relevant data points. You can have it suggest websites with presentations and sales pitches on competing products to yours (along with the competitor analysis) which lets you focus on reading their content instead of finding it. You can then have it gather together an outline of what the sales presentation should cover, along with sample titles for each of the slides.

Working with the AI, you can go back and forth a bit until you refine your idea and then you can start filling your slide deck with content. When you’re done, you can have the AI review your content, suggest edits on a multitude of things from grammar to tone and then deliver a beautifully buttoned-up sales presentation.

On the flipside, if you were to go to Canva and use its “magic presentation” tool, you’ll be given 5 slides with half and half pages, with some lukewarm content and some stock images. In the small to medium business space, this is honestly most of the way there and requires few edits, especially for internal meetings, but once again you’ll need to intervene.

Think of AI as a Team Member

When you’re prompting the AI, you should prompt it as if it was a member of your team. When you hand it a file to do analysis, you should ask it if you were asking someone who worked at your organization. You’ll be surprised as the speed and efficiency it can turn around mundane, boring tasks accurately.

Going back and forth with the AI and having it help you where you need to delegate tasks or have it work on article titles for A/B testing or provide tone suggestions let’s you focus entirely on refining your work. Work that ultimately is crafted with accuracy, oversight and care which is worth reading.

Leaning into AI to do the work for you, from our standpoint, is not a solution. Delegating tasks to the AI and overseeing the work is a much more suitable position.