Artificial intelligence (AI) has pervaded our lives in ways we would never have imagined, from Siri answering our voiced questions to Amazon recommending things based on our browser history.
The technology is progressing at a breakneck pace, with experts estimating that the sector will be worth $190 billion by 2025. It may not be time to freak out yet, but it is important to grasp how AI is affecting writers (and other professions), both now and in the future.
Will it grow so powerful that content creators prefer to edit machine-generated material instead of authoring original articles? Not likely, in my opinion. At least, not in the near future.
Although artificial intelligence is causing a stir, content writers aren’t going away.
It’s no secret that creating content takes a lot of time. Even with the various AI technologies currently available, creating a professional piece of content still requires a lot of time and effort.
An example of such a tool is called Jasper AI, a program that you feed with a brief of what you want it to create, and then it automatically writes the content for you. While it may be a fantastic writing assistant and even help reduce your writing time, you’ll still have to put in the work editing and fact-checking its output. Many “AI writers” like to pair such writing tools with other AI tools such as Surfer SEO to produce articles that are optimized for the internet.
The best way to describe AI in writing is “a convenience tool”. It isn’t likely to completely replace authors – at least not yet. There are still some things that it cannot achieve when it comes to writing.
Why AI will never truly replace human writers
Perhaps one day we’ll be able to program machines to be smart and adaptive enough to compete with us on an equal footing, but that day is still a long way off. We still have a few tricks under our sleeves when it comes to humans vs. AI.
1. Creativity
Artificial intelligence excels at transforming raw data into written material. The information is there, given in readable, grammatically correct terms, but something is lacking – and you can clearly see it.
It is just not possible to program authentic creativity into a machine at this time. In that regard, the human brain is lightyears ahead of any other organism or artificial intelligence.
2. Tone of voice
AI is growing better at mimicking our communication style, but it still hasn’t nailed down our natural voice. For instance, it will often use the same words, phrases, sentence lengths, which makes it sound a little robotic.
3. Passion
When you read a book, an article, poetry, or any other written work, you can frequently sense the author’s spirit in every word. The majority of writers are passionate about what they do for a living, and it shows. There’s much to be said for human perseverance and commitment.
There’s simply no way to reproduce the amount of sentiment, passion, and dedication that allows humans to connect with one another so intimately through indirect methods, no matter how advanced our AI algorithms become.
4. Compassion
Robots can perform a lot of things, but they can’t feel emotions or put themselves in our position to understand what we’re going through. As a result, AI is unlikely to replace people in customer service or any other profession where a personal and sympathetic relationship is required.
5. Hands-on experience
No amount of data can replace the value of firsthand experience, just as photographs of exotic locations on Google can’t replace actually being there. Similarly, AI writing can feel hollow beneath the surface when there are no experiences to draw from.
