If you’ve spent any time on LinkedIn or Instagram, you’ve probably seen a parade of slick ads for AI everything.

And if “content writing” is a phrase you’ve searched for in the past, then the social algorithms have probably bombarded you with promos for AI content writing.

But although the promise of cheap computer-generated text might sound like a tempting proposition, here are six significant reasons why you shouldn’t outsource your content to the chatbots:

Bots don’t have a brand voice

AI can’t penetrate the deep human psychology of creating a voice for your brand. If you want your brand to sound luxurious, edgy, trustworthy—or any other way—you’ll need to hire human writers who understand what these attributes look like and sound like in society.

AI content generators haven’t had real-life human experiences, so they don’t have a wealth of experience from which to draw. Automated content generators haven’t strolled into luxury stores or attended professional conferences with keynote speakers. They haven’t had real-life conversations and don’t know what sounds out-of-touch, stilted or awkward.

Additionally, AI hasn’t experienced any of the struggles that will resonate with your target audience. If you’re trying to address real-life audience pain points in your branded content, then AI might be able to include some relevant data or facts. But an automated text generator won’t be able to color your content in an authentic emotional hue.

Skilled human writers can write in particular tones to please your brand’s audience. Human writers can imagine themselves on the other side of the screen, and they’re able to read their own writing through the lens of outside perspectives. Humans can accomplish a feat of imagination and perspective-taking that’s not possible with AI.

Since the ultimate goal of content marketing is to make your content (and business brand) stand out from the rest, it’s crucial to develop a distinct tone that your website visitors can recognize as your own. Unfortunately, AI isn’t equipped to create a singular, unique tone for the writing on your site.

AI just won’t be able to communicate effectively in your intended brand voice. If you use AI writing, your brand voice will sound—well—artificial.

Sometimes AI hallucinates

No, AI isn’t micro-dosing, macro-dosing or even running a high fever. Yet hallucinations are a well-documented phenomenon of AI.

Hallucinations are a side effect of the process through which chatbots work: using language models to anticipate the most plausible string of upcoming words. The resulting text can contain any number of possible errors, from a subtle inaccuracy to a blatantly obvious mistake.

Consider the annoyance you might feel when auto-correct changes what you planned to say in a text message or email. The unfortunate truth is that the predictive automation of auto-correct isn’t always correct—and neither is the predictive language model of a chatbot.

A slew of errors due to AI hallucinations will directly counteract the goals of a brand trying to establish credibility through authoritative content. What’s worse, error-filled content might even turn off existing established customers who grow leery about the expertise or image of a brand.

Sometimes a chatbot’s hallucination can even contradict what the chatbot “said” at an earlier time. Consistency is not guaranteed with a chatbot—yet your prospects are looking for a business brand that’s consistent and trustworthy with the information it delivers.

AI certainly isn’t equipped to create content about delicate or potentially sensitive topics. There is no way for it to fact-check issues relating to health or safety. An automated system can’t do a reliable check for credible sources, and there’s no way for it to confirm its accuracy with an individual who has received higher education or advanced training in any particular field. AI can’t email human experts with its questions, nor can it talk to them to confirm any piece of unknown information.

In addition to the ethical issues related to posting inaccurate information, AI writing also creates a concern that search engines will downrank or delist content.

Search engines can sniff out bad AI writing

Trying to “game” the system doesn’t always end well. Google and other search engines are continually developing new ways to detect poor AI-generated content. If a search engine flags a piece of content as being spam generated by AI, that content won’t have any visibility. If it’s not listed on the search results pages, it won’t be able to attract prospective business leads.

Google ranks content on an E-E-A-T scale, evaluating its expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. If the algorithm picks up on the attempted use of automated technology to game the ranking system, it will mark the content as spam.

It’s not a stretch to imagine how automated content can be marked as spam. As discussed earlier, automated language models work to string together words with rapid-fire, imperfect methods, and resulting “hallucinations” are not uncommon. Remember that error-filled content doesn’t have a place on Google’s E-E-A-T scale.

Google can also pick up on patterns that serve as giveaways to mark “spammy” content. Although those in the AI industry are trying to refine language models to sound more natural and evade spam detection, the technology is clearly not up to speed yet. There are multiple reasons why search engines might more easily classify automated language as spam.

AI can’t tell what actually sounds interesting

A top goal of your content marketing strategy should be to create compelling content that keeps your readers coming back for more. You want your site to be bookmarked many times over as a destination for relevant and helpful information on niche, industry-specific topics.

AI isn’t able to evaluate its own content on a boredom scale, and it has no way of understanding why a human might glaze over a particular sentence, paragraph or complete blog post that it generates. Skilled human writers can anticipate what might be tedious to other humans, but AI isn’t able to gauge its own strung-together sentences to determine if they might send a website visitor into a sleepy stupor.

Sleepy stupor is precisely the state you want to avoid inducing when you’re delivering content to your prospects.

Skilled human content writers can make your content worthwhile

Here are the ways that a skilled human writer can make your content sound more interesting:

• By incorporating rich, vivid imagery into chunks of text, transporting the reader off the screen and onto a sense memory or specific place and time.

• By inserting snippets of real-life experience to depict human feelings, emotional growth, real-world behaviors and actions.

• By utilizing non-cheesy metaphorical language to make more complex topics understandable.

• By providing delightful doses of humor or heartrending pieces of poignancy.

• By subverting expectations and doing something different than most people are doing with their content writing.

Interesting human-written content will keep your readers coming back for more. If a reader makes it to the end of the article, blog post, whitepaper or social media post, that individual is more likely to turn into a lead for your brand.

Human writers can share their interesting opinions

Human writers can also bring color to your content by sharing their opinions and accurately summarizing other people’s opinions. Some brands are built mainly on public consensus, and there’s no way to automate text on topics related to brands whose customers value specific tastes, styles or trends.

Let’s consider a content topic that’s very appealing to blog readers: food. A realtor trying to promote their brand might hire a talented human writer to create a piece about the local Italian restaurants in their town. The realtor’s content strategy might be to seek search engine hits for their specific locality, and so they might use the blog title of “4 Great Italian Restaurants in Bronxville, New York.” A human content writer can make this topic appealing by accurately summarizing and quoting the Italian restaurants’ reviews, writing about the delicious homemade sauces, imported savory cheeses and fresh-baked breads.

Those Italian restaurants highlighted in the Bronxville piece will be overjoyed to see their restaurants get such publicity. They might even promote the link to the blog on their own social media channels, further solidifying the local realtor’s brand in the community. Thus human writing can directly turn into a strategy for networking and making real-life connections with other businesses.

Human writing is exponentially more likely to attract customer interest, because it pinpoints the topics that get people talking. Humans can write with flair about a variety of topics using relevant, appetizing language.

AI might give you irrelevant content

If AI doesn’t have a direct answer for something, it won’t always “admit” that it’s come up empty. It will try its hardest to produce some content of any sort, which means that sometimes it will be more or less off-topic. Unfortunately, AI won’t (and can’t) determine if you’re rolling your eyes or sighing in frustration as it continues to give you non-applicable information about your topic.

AI can’t understand when it’s in over its head. It can’t differentiate when information can’t be found on the World Wide Web and has to be sourced from real life. AI can’t call up a research librarian, visit an in-person location or interview a human. AI also can’t search through maps, images, and videos with the eyes of a human. Instead, it might give you some “hallucinations” or non-applicable content.

It’s essential to have a solid, on-topic content development strategy when trying to increase the organic traffic on your website. Every website article and blog post should include relevant keywords—and you don’t want your keywords to stick out like sore thumbs. The keywords should naturally flow within your relevant, on-topic writing. When using automated content generators, you can’t guarantee that your resultant content will seamlessly incorporate your topical keywords.

Your brand might appear shady or suspect with AI writing

Your brand image is everything. It’s what keeps you afloat.

Never under any circumstances do you want people to doubt the validity or expertise of your brand.

AI content writing can come across as phony, strange and unnatural. Just because the automated text generator’s writing is in English doesn’t mean it flows like natural, native English.

Your potential customers should feel comfortable and confident that they’ll receive products and/or services from a brand that can effectively communicate with them. Customers have enough doubts and suspicions about new-to-them brands already, wondering if real-life humans will be available to address their potential questions and concerns. It won’t help your brand to have customers click away from your blogs written in artificial English.

Consider the buyer’s journey as they discover your brand online. This potential customer will click on the search engine results pages, discovering your piece of content matching their search query. The reader will scroll through your article or blog looking for relevant content—typically not reading it word-for-word, just scanning and searching.

Yet it will only take a few moments for your AI-written text to look fishy and spammy, with its strangely formal turns of phrases and contrived sentence structures. Now you’ve lost your potential customer because now they’ve clicked over to your competitor’s site.

It’s a fiercely competitive world of content on the World Wide Web. If your business brand wants to gain a foothold in its industry niche, you need to hire talented human writers who can skillfully execute original, compelling content.

If you’re in search of talented human content writers for your business website(s), reach out to our team at 1st Class Writing. We have a firm “no-AI” writing policy for each one of our writers, so you’re guaranteed to get original content writing in natural English. Our writers are college-educated and English is their native language. Our writers’ work is quality-checked by our experienced content editors. We pride ourselves on paying attention to detail, checking facts and using credible sources.

Let our content team help you develop a sound strategy to propel your business to the top of the search results pages.