Want to write appealing content using AI: Don’t get your hopes high!!!
We, content creators, usually have one wish and it is “creating appealing content”. Every author desires their content to appeal to thousands of readers so that their message can spread to a large audience. The part of receiving appreciation comes once you have succeeded in generating appeal.
To generate appealing content we use various tools, resources, images, content forms, and then get the peer review done before publishing. The content goes through multiple stages starting from generation, self-review to peer review. There are AI tools available that claim that they can help in generating good content. The scope of these tools varies from extracting information, generating the content, identifying tags & images, reviewing the content, and then publishing it. It is great to have an AI tool that can eliminate the need for human reviewers (which most of us don’t have access to). But setting your expectations right is the key.
The organizations claim their tools to be one-stop solution for a variety of needs. Their claims go from content generation to reviewing. The way they promote tools is “the tool will generate amusing content with your minimal efforts”.
Organisations claim that their AI tools will generate the most amusing content even when the author has no skills in writing. Whereas the reality is, your content will continue to suck if you don’t have the skills, it will just suck less.
Understanding the limitations of AI in writing
AI is perhaps the most significant invention by humans and I am very hopeful about its capabilities. But I also understand how it functions. Thus, my expectations from AI are limited to a helping tool and not as a replacement of humans.
Living intelligence is separate from AI by the fact that we can create something new. However, AI starts by understanding data and creating something from that data. It uses various permutations & combinations with possibilities of success to arrive at the results.
The appeal of content is not created by the facts, data, and insights that it covers but it is created by the unique author footprint that it carries.
To understand it. When Buddha talks about the value of life, he has a million followers. But the same statement by your school teacher would only get him humiliated and the students would laugh at him.
AI is a really good tool to identify data, extract insights from the vast amount of data that is present on the internet, select popular icons & images that go well with the data, identify possible syntax mistakes in the content, and identify when & where should you publish it. But AI doesn’t carry the human touch. It doesn’t carry the struggle of a human, the learnings of a human, and the life experience of a human.
AI doesn’t perceive anything but it looks at everything as data. You and I perceive things differently based on our life experiences. The perception and interpretation of a set of data are different for two different human beings while it is the same for the AI. That’s the reason, the same data attracts two different sets of investors to put their money in two different sets of stocks.
Writing is like Investing in stocks. The same information is perceived differently by different individuals and they interpret it according to their own life experiences. As a result, the content created by these individuals carries a unique footprint of their existence. The appeal of content comes from this unique footprint and not from the quantity of data that the content carries.
What should you expect from AI?
The expectations from AI should be limited to its use as a helping tool. It is a great tool that can help you identify syntax mistakes. It can help you select good icons & images from millions of possibilities. It can identify words that attract attention. It identifies the same data for all individuals. They get access to same kind of data and then they analyse it, understand it, and use it to create a unique content. When the author hands over the part of content creation to AI, it starts generating similar output for everyone. There is no novelty & uniqueness in it. It is a monotonous content that doesn’t carry any appeal.
But don’t let it take the driver’s seat. It is a good compass to help you navigate the world of writing but when it becomes a driver, it can only take you on a fixed route and you won’t ever explore what lies beyond that. And, you already know, fixed routes only create traveling not a journey.
