What You Should Know Before You Use AI to Create Content

Artificial intelligence is evolving practically every minute. As such, the ways that it can be incorporated into our lives are evolving, too. 

When it comes to creating content, bloggers and publishers can find themselves flooded with options advertised to improve their writing, video or other content. However, while artificial intelligence can be an extremely useful tool (we certainly love AI at Ezoic), there is a lot of information out there that can be difficult to navigate. 

If you find yourself wondering if you should be incorporating more machine learning or artificial intelligence into your content plan, but you don’t know where to start, or what to trust, read on.

Many of our entrepreneurial publishers have already done the initial research and put some of these tools to the test, including Ron Stefanski, owner of onehourprofessor.com, who helped us gather some overarching tips for this piece. When it comes to AI for content writing, all technology is not good technology, and there are a few questions to ask yourself before investing in AI for content creation. 

The things we’re going to touch on today are…

1. What is AI in general?
2. What do we mean by AI tools for content creation?
3. What are some advantages and practical uses for AI in your content?
4. What are some cases in which you might want to avoid artificial intelligence for content creation purposes?
5. The future of AI

1. What is AI in general?

At Ezoic, we’re big believers in AI. What makes our technology different from the rest is that we incorporate AI to determine the best ad placements, the type of ads, how you can best optimize your content, and more. This allows us to always be improving and serving different content to different visitors. It’s kind of our thing.

When we talk about artificial intelligence, we’re just referring to computers doing things that humans have historically done themselves. Artificial intelligence generally performs basic tasks that help increase productivity, such as analyzing patterns in data, recreating language, recognizing trends and helping with optimization.

When it comes to Ezoic, AI looks like:

• Serving different versions of pages to different users based on their behaviors, location and many other patterns
• Analyzing multiple technologies on your website and easily giving suggestions in one place on how to improve it
• An update on a popular existing tool coming soon! Spoiler alert!
• And more…

2. What do we mean by AI tools for content creation?

In the large range of tools employing artificial intelligence that exist, we’re focused today on those that have to do with creating blogs, social media posts, or other multimedia content like videos. 

The large variety of functions that these tools have is impressive. Below are a few examples of things that these tools can do:

• Check your grammar and spelling
• Aid in keyword research
• Ideas for content based on relevance and competitors
• Writing full articles based on data or specific topics
• Drafting quick social media posts 
• Build outlines for blogs
• And a lot more!

There are several tools available to use AI for content creation; this blog online also rounds up a list of other popular AI and machine learning tools that can help with content creation and content strategy. 

The tools that Stefanski uses on the regular are SurferSEO, Clearscope, and Clickflow, which he says mainly focus on optimizing content prior to publishing, or optimizing already published content. 

3. What are some advantages and practical uses for AI in your content?

The main advantage, and this is an obvious one, is the time-saving element that AI can bring to your content efforts. If you are trying to research competition and optimize your keywords to rank as high as possible in the SERP, for example, it could take a computer less than a minute to pull keywords or other data that could help you, but it could take you multiple hours to do the same job.

The beauty of machine learning is that at times, computers can do a better job of researching through large amounts of data to make your strategy more effective.

Rather than creating content from scratch, using AI to optimize content that has already been created is a great way to incorporate AI into your content strategy. 

As of now, the status of tools can really differ, and some may not be ready for efficient use just yet. Because of this, we believe that the following are the best areas to currently try to incorporate AI:

• Keyword research
• Grammar help
• Social media posting
• Outline building 
• Idea generation

This is because these tools have plenty of data to work with, and can produce fool-proof results. These are relatively simple tasks that can be taken off your plate, but are low-risk because of the quality and stage of development of AI tools in these realms.

Which brings us to how not to use AI for your content, as of now.

4. What are some cases in which you might want to avoid artificial intelligence?

We must begin this section with the caveat that if you have a tool that is working for you and you have the results you are looking for, keep using it! 

AI is ever-evolving, so some of these tools that do not work very predictably today might be great in a week, or in a month. 

Generally speaking, the tools that create content from scratch are not yet reliable. More often than not, a blog written by a machine learning tool can be difficult to follow and lack flow that only a human can create at this state.

There are also plagiarism risks to AI-generated content. The content can frequently be copied and pasted or retrieved from other sources. This will harm sites against content policies by Google, ultimately making that content impossible to monetize and damaging the credibility of the entire site.

Credibility is of the utmost importance when it comes to creating content. For example, Stefanski pointed out that if AI pulls a statistic but does not explain where it is coming from, or the context of the data, it loses relevance in the piece. 

And we agree. Essentially, AI can do a lot of things, but writing complex content that is nuanced and valuable isn’t something AI is great at yet. However, writing an article that discusses criticism of Marvel movies, for example, is not something a machine can do well without training it in a way that would take exponentially longer than just writing, and that training would be unique to that article and not scalable.

5. The future of AI

With all this in mind, we also want to give the exception that video is different. Video could use AI to take existing content and then provide some simple preferences for creators to customize the video, allowing it to be a far higher quality than many created by humans today to augment their content. 

The world is moving to video. It is growing faster than all other mediums and we plan to help our publishers keep up with this trend using AI. We also think there’s value in our leverage together and think this gives us a strong community effect that we expect to be a major advantage for Ezoic customers in 2022.

So, should I use AI for content creation?

AI is extremely powerful and generally is a great option for certain steps in your content process. However, many AI tools are not up to par for creating content from scratch...yet.

AI is useful for setting up outlines, understanding what Google will rank for, and looking at competitors. AI tools that find images or write content on their own are still in development and are not the best option for entirely replacing a human’s ability to  produce written content. 

However, the future of AI is still unwritten. Many tools involving videos, images and even blog-writing are in development and are likely to make big waves when they are up to par for sites.

Until then, be sure to monitor content created by AI closely to make sure it is improving your content, not hurting it.

Regardless of if you use AI in your content creation, you should still focus on creating quality content. Compelling content is the core of what makes a blog successful, so we’ve compiled some links below to guide you to other helpful tips on creating the best content possible.

Some more links you might want to check out with relevant content:

• More content from Ezoic Publisher Ron Stefanski
• Ezoic Blog: The best publishing tools according to blogging and publishing experts
• Ezoic Blog: Web Development Trends & Tools Rising In Popularity in 2020
• Ezoic’s collection of blogs on Content Creation