Will AI Revolutionize the Content Writing Space in the Coming Days?

This article has been contributed By Mayank Jain, Co-founder of Scalenut.

The growth of technology is phenomenal in the present day. There was a time when people were afraid of technology and blamed it as the primary reason for unemployment.

But as times change, people change. Today people are slowly warming up to technology and seeing it as a medium to reduce their workload. In fact, advanced technology will take over 30% of repetitive and mundane job tasks.

Technology-driven processes have surpassed many conventional ways and made our lives simpler. One such technology that is slowly making its presence felt across most industries is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Content writing is no exception.

Yes, you heard that right. We are crossing a period where AI has started writing intelligent content for people to read. This post is about this futuristic journey, beginning from the fusion of AI and content creation. Before that, it is essential to understand about NLP, one of the core concepts of AI, that has multiple hats to wear in shaping the future of content creation.

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?
How is AI shaping the future of Content Creation?
Challenges to AI in Content Creation
Conclusion

What is Natural Language Processing (NLP)?

You might have seen Google correcting your search result with a “Did You Mean:” question or Alexa responding to your commands. That is actually NLP algorithms demonstrating their technical prowess.

NLP is an element of AI that finds profound application in the field of content creation. We can even call it the backbone of AI-generated content. It understands texts and interprets human languages. In other words, it learns from actual interactions with humans. With enormous data under its hood thanks to millions of search queries and search commands, the NLP algorithm generates human-like content in any language of your choice.

With that basic introduction, let’s dive into the main topic.

How is AI shaping the future of Content Creation?

The advent of automatic content writing tools

AI-based content writing tools are being developed across the globe and can generate content thanks to various NLP algorithms embedded in them. Several businesses are already using such tools for their content creation needs. Semrush’s ‘State of Content Ops & Outsourcing Report 2021 confirmed that around 12% of participants admitted to using AI writing technology to create content.

These AI content tools can generate high-quality content automatically and instantly. All that you need to do is give some context to the AI engine, such as keywords, target country, short description, etc. The tool then goes around the search engine and finds high-ranking content. Based on this, it comes up with a comprehensive and optimized content piece for you.

SEO-driven Content Generation

For a very long time, search engines have been working on rule-based actions. It required an SEO expert who could understand the rules and modify the content accordingly. But with the advent of AI and its infusion into SEO, the situation has changed drastically. Today, even a layperson can create SEO-enriched content thanks to several AI-based SEO tools. These tools perform a high-end search, show what your competitors are doing, keywords to rank for, the H1 H2 tags to use, and so on. Basically, the tools become your SEO guide and walk you through the different steps to rank better than your competitors.

Enhanced Creativity

Creativity is the foundation of any good content. And AI, a machine without a human brain, is slowly stepping into the world of creativity as well.  Again, NLP plays a role here. When AI interacts with thousands of humans, it slowly understands what the humans like to hear and what they consider interesting. The day is not very far when AI-based tools will develop unique and interesting concepts for your advertisements or even a book you plan to write.

Even today, there are several tools that can come up with unique blog ideas and product descriptions based on one word you enter. In other words, it's the perfect antidote for your writer’s block.

Challenges to AI in Content Creation

Unfortunately, the journey ahead is not a bed of roses. Several challenges will come up when we rely too much on AI for content creation. Here are they -

Variation in tones and communication style

Yes, artificial intelligence has indeed evolved to a great extent in “understanding” human communication. But that doesn’t make it better than us. AI can write amazing content without repetition of words or phrases, but at the end of the day, it tends to sound a bit robotic. The variation in communication exhibited by humans has not entirely been interpreted by AI yet and will be a mighty task in the coming days. As Founder & CEO of Codeless, Brad Smith quotes -

“The biggest problem with AI right now is its overreliance on patterns and the probability of certain words or phrases showing up next to each other when you reference certain topics. It is merely taking what’s already out there on certain topics and then playing a Robocop version of the word game Mad Libs,”

Expressing Emotions

Humans have the ability to play around with the emotions of the reader through their choice of words. It might be a challenge for AI to emulate. Imagine two stories, one written by a human and another by an AI engine. Now, as a reader, there are high chances that you will feel some emotion reading the story written by the human as it’s been written by someone with actual feelings. Even though the story written by the AI engine might be good, there are chances that the reader may not be able to connect with it well.

Inability to Make Decisions

We write content based on our past learnings and can shift between different topics on the go. This is a lacking feature in AI since it is programmed to run only within a set boundary of related topics. For example, we can bring a concept of a movie into a blog on the stock market to make it interesting, but this might not be possible for the AI engine.

Conclusion

The future where AI takes control of content creation and SEO is not very far. But the chances of total domination still look slim with the array of challenges that lay ahead. But one thing is sure - AI is here to help all the content creators out there and make their lives simpler in coming up with world-class content with minimal effort.