With the advent of more and newer social media apps plus a 24-hour news cycle, there’s so much content being produced and published into the world. And now with the addition of AI, that number is about to go through the roof. How do people keep up with it all? Well, the fact of the matter is most people don’t.
So how do you build expert-level digital content that’ll cut through all the noise to reach and resonate with your intended audience? The easy answer is drawing on what makes you different – your humanness, your experience, your research, and your point of view on things. When it comes down to it, what you’re trying to replace with the use of AI is time, not talent.
Did you know?
6 million+ blog entries are created by bloggers worldwide, every day.
– Zippia
Currently, we believe you can separate content into two buckets:
- Created content
This content holds value because humans created it. It includes things such as new ideas, thought leadership thinkpieces, and other unique content. It can’t be recreated with AI because it requires original thought and drawing on the experience of a person.
- Constructed content
This content only has value after it’s been assembled. While AI can, and will more and more, create content such as blog posts and social media captions, it does so by pulling from content it has either scraped from the internet or been fed by people. No original thoughts are being brought out, no unique experience is being drawn on to do so. So, you’ll end up with a lot of similar content being created.
While you can churn out a lot of the latter, it’s proven that AI doesn’t actually know everything and at times it can create false or misleading information, also known as an AI hallucination or confabulation. So, even if you are using it to build content like blogs, be sure you have an IRL human fact-checking and editing to ensure it’s ready for general consumption for the public. Otherwise, you may find yourself in hot water, whether that’s just a bit of public embarrassment or as serious as someone taking legal action because you’ve put something out into the world that’s wrong.
Keeping it quality over quantity.
In December 2022, Google updated their search quality ratings to deal with the addition of AI-produced content. Previously you could remember it with the acronym E-A-T, which stood for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness. Now, it reads E-E-A-T with the addition of Experience on the front end. This adds weight to using the author’s first-hand experience with the subject matter, something that doesn’t happen when you’re asking a machine to create things like blog posts or similar content.
This will be helpful when it comes to your SEO work. While they won’t penalize AI-generated content by default, search engines will keep giving priority to high-quality, useful material created with humans in mind rather than AI-generated stuff. To keep your pages’ quality rankings, don’t rely solely on generative AI for content creation. Instead, you can use AI to figure out how to boost the quality and reach of your original, human-created content.
The future of searches
As generative content, helpful chatbots, and more emerge, everyone is getting in on the AI train. Even Google is building an experimental AI-integrated ChatGPT-like search engine that offers a reimagining of online search. Staying on the cutting edge of technology and user journeys now more often than not includes AI in some form or another.
Humans vs. AI: a content challenge.
Just like the folklore tale told the story of John Henry and his duel against a drilling machine, CMO Huddles ran a 10-week ‘Man vs Machine’ content challenge.
First, they had 60 blogs produced:
- Human: 20 created only by humans hands on keyboards
- Humanoid: 20 almost entirely generated by ChatGPT-3.5 (proofread, fact-checked and lightly edited by the team to ensure they weren’t putting misinformation out into the world)
- Hybrid: 20 generated by ChatGPT-3.5 and then levelled up by the team to match the human-authored posts’ quality
Then, the articles were published into the world and tracked for search rankings, visibility and traffic over a 10-week test period by the team.
Key results
AI was faster – Not surprisingly, the AI-generated content was 3x faster to research, outline, write and find sources.
But, AI still needs those training wheels – the team found errors and inconsistencies throughout the generated content so human oversight and editing is still required.
Humans are still the best at traffic jams – Human-generated content brought in more site traffic than both hybrid and AI-only, improving traffic and rankings by 3x more than AI-authored content.
A shared approach is best – Using a hybrid approach is probably best, taking 1.5 hours instead of the 3.5 that human-only generated content took.
Visibility ≠ traffic – Hybrid approaches helped drive increased search visibility but it didn’t translate into increased traffic.
Lending a helping hand.
With AI, content creators have a powerful ally at their disposal. As mentioned above, AI is useful in saving you time so it’s great to use for things such as building outlines, or the bare bones of a blog post or content piece. But put a similar query into something like Chat GPT multiple times and you’ll see that you’re getting similar work over and over. This means that there’s a risk of having duplicate content on the web if others are trying to build content in the same arena of thought as you.
By using AI-driven research and optimizing content with the help of AI analytics, you can elevate your digital content to expert levels. Leveraging it for content creation and pushing visuals further enhances the overall quality and impact of the material.
Run what you brung.
It’s crucial to remember that AI should be used as a tool to complement human creativity and expertise rather than a replacement. It can be useful as a tool to aid you in building outlines and in brainstorming ideas when you get stuck. But without original ideas and a foundation of experience, it isn’t going to get you very far when it comes to creating unique content that resonates with your audience. At the end of the day, most blog posts fail because the content isn’t purposeful, original, or engaging.
By striking the right balance, creators can produce expert-level digital content that their audience will connect with and trust, leaving a lasting impression in the ever-evolving digital landscape.