Pros and Cons of Using AI for Writing Blogs

If you follow tech news, you may have noticed that AI is a hot topic. AI is used in tons of applications today from messaging bots to diagnosing cancer. There are also more and more companies offering AI to write blogs. Should you be using AI to write your blogs? That is what we are going to talk about today, the pros and cons of using AI for blogs.

We, at Cityline, have written about blogs before. This is one of our areas of expertise because the regular publishing of high-quality blog articles can be a powerful tool in SEO, or getting Google to improve your website’s ranking. Every month we write and publish hundreds of blogs for a variety of businesses. So, we have definitely been exploring AI for blog writing, and whether we should be using it ourselves. Here, below, is our take on the pros and cons of using AI for blogging.

Pros

Price And Speed

Price points may vary, but to use AI to write blogs you will probably be paying a monthly subscription fee. There is no doubt that AI will write a blog faster than a human will. In addition, the speed of creating a blog with AI is almost the same whether the blog is 200 words or 20,000. Whatever you pay for AI, it is cheaper than what you will pay humans. That’s a pro for AI.

Speed is closely related to price because the fact that AI works so fast is why it is cheaper. What the AI software spits out is also “clean” copy. There are few or no grammatical mistakes, and these articles are written in good, solid English. So, speed is definitely a pro for AI.

Cons

Quality and Originality

The problem with using AI to write blog articles is a problem of quality and originality, two terms that are closely intertwined. And this is a complicated subject. When we talk about quality, we are talking about new information, written in good English, and written for SEO, or using best practices for making Google happy (a complete discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article.) When we talk about originality, we are talking about a new angle for the topic, or a new way to present the information, or even new—never before used—semantics and syntax, which we will address later.

One of the reasons why the regular publishing of high-quality blog articles is important for SEO and Google rankings (with emphasis on high-quality) is because Google recognizes when a site is expanding with new and original information. If a website is adding content that is not new and original then Google recognizes that, too.

The way AI works in the simplest of terms is by researching, crawling, and scraping the internet for information on whatever topic you have assigned to it. The blog that the AI software produces is not original; rather it is knitted together from information the AI plucked from different sources far and wide. For that reason, it is akin to plagiarism. The bad news here is that Google can tell if a blog was written by AI and that will not help your SEO. In fact, Google may give you a worse ranking if your content is from AI. Google knows and recognizes AI. Because the most important part of adding to a website is the quality of what you add. This makes quality and originality of AI blogs a serious “con”.

Now, you may be wondering, what if I use AI to write blogs and then have a highly trained human edit the blogs to make them more original? That’s a possibility, but then you have to add the time and expense of having a writer work on those blogs anyway, and your exciting initial cost and time savings of using AI in the first place may quickly disappear.

The last topic we want to touch upon is the originality in writing. Remember, AI writes based on the instructions you give to the software in the same way that computers can do complex calculations provided you instruct the computers what calculations to make. But writing is not a black and white calculation; rather it is a creative pursuit. How writers use syntax, diction, and semantics is very personal and cannot be broken down like a mathematical proof and taught to AI because it is individual and specific to each writer. There is no one holy guide on how to do it.

To date, AI has not been able to make blog writing feel personal and human, and, aside from Google, our own trained eyes can spot AI writing a mile away. We find these AI articles to be bland, formal, lacking in detail, and lacking in any personality. When you are talking/writing to a messaging bot, don’t you recognize right away whether or not a human is behind it? We do. Yes, an expanding website with new content being added all the time is important in SEO, but that content has to be original and high-quality and written for SEO. If the content is not original and high-quality then the addition of such content may hurt your SEO instead of help it.

Maybe someday AI will be able to write beautiful and engaging text, like novels by Dickens or poetry by Shelley. But today is not that day. At Cityline Websites, we write to improve our clients’ positions on Google.  Therefore, using AI is not even an option.

Maybe one day AI will make sense for blogging, but we are finding that our results are far superior and more cost-effective using the old-fashioned human method, complete with blood, sweat, and tears.