Finding gigs has seemingly become extremely difficult for content writers and editors these days. The reason: more businesses are turning to AI to write and edit content for them.
I understand where business owners and executives are coming from—why indeed would they need human writers or editors when they can just use AI-powered tools to generate new blog articles, product descriptions, and marketing copies? Why would they spend thousands of dollars on human workers when they can simply use AI and save more on salaries?
Here’s the truth: AI is good, but humans are still better. And I am saying this from experience.
Content Writing with ChatGPT
As someone who manages a blogging website, I tried to understand how AI might fully replace human workers; in my case, human writers and editors. I got myself a ChatGPT account and a Grammarly account just to see how useful and accurate these tools can be. I used ChatGPT to generate new articles for me. At first glance, the articles were good, and I was quite impressed. However, upon close scrutiny, I decided not to publish the articles on my website. Why? Here are my reasons:
- They read like music without a melody. They sound flat and unalive. In other words, they lack warmth and authenticity, which human touch usually has. Although you can ask the app to make the writing sound lively and more human-like, it still cannot beat how a human touch can bring writing to life.
- They lack emotional connection. Human copywriters can tailor their content to specific audiences, adapting tone and style to fit brand identity and reader expectations. This skill is crucial in content marketing and publishing, as it helps establish an emotional connection with the target audience. While AI can mimic tone to some extent, it often struggles to maintain a consistent and distinctive voice, compromising continuity, quality, and authenticity, which are traits that build trust and engagement with readers.
- They provide erroneous data. Content from ChatGPT might look confident with the data it provides, but if you perform a thorough check, some facts don’t add up. According to the University of Maryland, AI often generates misinformation, although many of its responses might be accurate. This is called AI hallucinations. It is, therefore, crucial to verify all the information included in the AI-generated article before publishing it on any website, which brings me to my point: AI will never fully replace human content writers and editors.
Editing Content with Grammarly
Don’t get me wrong – Grammarly is a great tool for editing written content. It helps you catch mistakes in grammar, spelling, and punctuation as you write. It also offers suggestions to enhance your overall writing style. However, relying on this tool entirely to edit written content might lead to serious mistakes.
For instance, I used Grammarly to edit a paragraph in one of the documents I was working on. It caught my typos and other obvious errors, which was great, because it made my work so much easier and allowed me to edit the document faster. It also provided me with suggestions on how to improve the clarity of the sentences. However, I noticed that when I clicked on those suggestions, some of them altered the entire meaning of the original text, compromising the overall quality of the document. This made me realize that Grammarly, despite being a huge help in the editing process, should not be entirely relied upon to edit an entire document. Human editors are still needed to ensure that the intended messages are being conveyed accurately and not altered by the tool.
Conclusion
Despite the popularity of ChatGPT, Grammarly, and other AI tools, I believe there is still room for significant improvement in this area of technology. While AI can help write content and edit documents more efficiently, human intervention is still necessary to create content that truly converts. After all, humans possess the intelligence from which AI derives its knowledge. AI tools excel at retrieving, storing, and processing vast amounts of data from various sources simultaneously; however, they often lack the ability to comprehend the information they are retrieving and generating. Understanding and reasoning are inherent characteristics possessed by humans, while AI relies solely on information scraped from various online sources.
Should the use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Grammarly, be avoided due to their limitations? No. These tools have their uses, and their advantages have been proven many times in different scenarios. In fact, I will definitely continue using them, not to write or edit entire articles or documents, but as a guide to improve my work. Should companies and entrepreneurs completely replace human content writers and editors with these tools? No. I believe that these tools will never completely replace human content writers and editors, because no matter how great these tools are in producing content, nothing beats the human touch and intelligence. After all, AI imitates while humans innovate.
