Introduction
Using AI to generate content can revolutionize your workflow, allowing even small teams to scale their output efficiently. With tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai, creating diverse content types becomes effortless. However, AI-generated content demands well-crafted prompts and human oversight to ensure quality and accuracy. These tools offer actionable suggestions to enhance SEO and content marketing, readability, and tone, making content more engaging and effective. In this guide, we’ll explore the pros and cons of AI-generated content, best practices for using these tools, and much more to help you navigate this evolving landscape.
What is AI-Generated Content?
AI-generated content is digital material produced by machine learning tools using human prompts. AI tools can generate content in various formats, including:
- Written content like text and articles
- Visual content such as images and graphics
- Video content featuring animations and avatars
- Audio content, ranging from speech to music
AI content marketing leverages these tools to automate creative tasks and accelerate workflows, saving creators time and money. However, there are drawbacks to accompany these benefits. First, let’s explore how AI marketing tools actually create content.
How Does AI Generate Content?
AI content generators analyze existing material, process its meaning, and identify patterns by training on large datasets of text, visuals, or audio. Their algorithms learn to predict the next word, pixel, or sound based on their training data, enabling them to create complete images, videos, songs, or articles. Interacting with these tools typically involves using prompts. Generative AI tools and chatbots leverage natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context and meaning of your input. They then use their algorithms to generate content based on your prompts. AI-powered chatbots analyze human inputs to identify entities and intent, generating appropriate responses. These AI content generation tools typically rely on one of two methods:
Structured Prompts
AI SEO tools like Semrush’s ContentShake AI use structured prompts, where you provide specific information such as keywords, tone of voice, and word count. The tool then uses your inputs to produce AI-generated content.
Free-Form Prompts
Chatbot tools like ChatGPT allow for free-form prompts. You engage in a dialogue with the tool to explain the content you want and any specific elements to incorporate, such as keywords or a particular tone of voice. You can refine the prompt as needed to achieve the desired output.
What Are the Pros of AI-Generated Content?
- Time Savings: Generative AI tools can produce content in mere seconds. More complex outputs, like long-form articles or videos, might take a few minutes, but this is still significantly faster than a human content creator. Incorporating AI content into your workflow saves time, allowing you to focus on more strategic projects.
- Cost Savings: Compared to traditional content creation, AI-generated content is faster and requires minimal effort during the generation stage. Consequently, using AI tools typically costs much less than hiring human creators. For instance, writers, designers, and editors may charge hundreds of dollars per piece, while many AI tools are free or cost under $100 per month.
- Scalable Production: Generative AI tools can scale content production far more rapidly than a human team. They can produce several times more content at any time with minimal lead time. In contrast, scaling production with a human team requires careful planning, rebalancing workloads, or hiring and training new team members.
- Consistent Output: With consistent inputs, AI tools generate consistent outputs, making them ideal for producing content that fits specific templates, such as product descriptions or optimized blog posts. Finding the ideal prompt may require some trial and error, but once you have a successful template, you can reuse it for future content creation.
What Are the Cons of AI-Generated Content?
- Lack of Originality: AI tools learn from existing datasets to generate “new” content, which often shares similarities with existing material. As a result, purely AI-generated content struggles to be original or introduce new ideas. To make AI output truly original, you need to add a human touch by reworking the material and injecting your own ideas.
- Limited Helpfulness: Since AI content is based on existing material, it lacks unique insights or experiences. This limitation means it may not meet Google’s definition of helpful content, which emphasizes creating content for readers rather than search engines. While AI-generated content with relevant keywords and internal links can be good for SEO content creation, it often requires human subject matter experts to make it genuinely helpful.
- Low-Quality Content: Despite referencing large datasets, AI content tools don’t know everything and often aren’t designed to verify accuracy. Many tools, like ChatGPT, even include warnings about this drawback. AI-generated content can contain mistakes and biases, compromising its quality. Additionally, AI tools may follow suboptimal structures and often don’t include visuals, although tools like Semrush’s ContentShake AI do. Therefore, it’s often best to use AI for brainstorming ideas or producing rough drafts.
- Copyright Issues: AI tools train on content that might be under copyright. While these tools generally don’t duplicate copyrighted content, they can produce derivative works based on original materials, sometimes too closely. This similarity makes human checking and editing crucial to ensure you’re not plagiarizing or breaching copyright when using AI content.
How to Use AI-Generated Content
- Idea Generation & Topic Research
AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT can assist with content ideation for marketing campaigns. Start by sharing a general concept for the campaign, such as:
Based on the results, refine the prompt to better fit your campaign or brand. For example, you may want to focus on content marketing or social media marketing:
Use these ideas to guide your SEO content marketing strategy or as starting points to create more specific inputs, such as “provide more information about creating effective email newsletter campaigns.
- Blog Posts
Generate blog posts or articles using AI writing tools like Semrush’s ContentShake AI. Start by clicking the “My own idea” button and inputting a topic, then click the “Start writing” button.
ContentShake homepage with “My own idea” button selected, article prompt entered, and “Start writing” button highlighted.
For title and keyword suggestions, click “See suggestions” under “Title” or “Your target keywords.” Select any options you want to apply, and adjust the word count, tone of voice, and readability level to fit your brand or project. When ready, click the “Create article” button.
AI content generation form with “See suggestions” underlined and “Create article” button highlighted.
Once the tool generates the article, including text and relevant free images from Unsplash, click the “Go to editor” button to customize it and add a human touch.
In the “Improvements” section, review the suggested changes to enhance the draft’s SEO, readability, and tone of voice. You may need to insert keywords for SEO or rewrite wordy sentences for better readability.
AI content marketing SEO tools can serve as a useful starting point for creating content, with improvement suggestions making it easy to enhance its quality and add your own insights and experience.
- Media Assets
You can create AI images for blog posts, social media content, or emails using an AI image generator. For example, DALL·E 3 can generate images from text prompts.
To generate AI videos, you can use the AI Video Marketing Automator app.
This app has three options for creating a video:
- URL to Video: Enter a URL and automatically turn website content into a video
- AI Prompt: Input a topic to get an AI-generated script
- Blank: Paste your text or create a video from scratch
Choose one of these options and provide the required details.
When you select “AI Prompt” you’ll need to enter a topic, select a video length, choose a color, and pick an image style.
You can also set up a brand kit to incorporate your brand’s colors, fonts, and voice. Click “Create Video” to generate a video.
Once the app generates the video, watch and review the AI content. You can edit the text, narration voice, and more.
Also, you can edit to add any missing information. Like the missing logo in the example below. When you’re done editing, click the “Export” button.
While your video is rendering, you can give it a title and add tags. You can also schedule your video for social media posting.
When your video has finished rendering, you can click “Download Video” and schedule it to your chosen platforms. You can also manually mark it as published.
- Social Media Posts
You can use AI to generate numerous social media posts quickly by inputting a prompt for a templated response tailored to specific platforms.
ContentShake AI also serves as an effective social media content generator alongside its blog post creation capabilities. From the tool’s dashboard, click “Start writing” next to “Create social media post from scratch.”
Select one or more social media channels, input a brief description of the desired post, choose a tone of voice and post type, then click “Create post.”
For example, ContentShake AI automatically identifies stock images based on your prompt and adds alt text. You can replace these images with AI-generated ones or search for different options from Unsplash without leaving the interface.
After making any necessary tweaks within the editor, you can simply copy and paste the content into your social profiles when you are ready to publish.
- Improving Existing Content
AI generators go beyond drafting new content — they can also enhance content you’ve already written.
AI SEO tools, like SEO Writing Assistant, can help you refine AI-generated content or old/existing content before publishing. From the dashboard, select an existing project or click “+ Analyze new text” to begin fresh.
Enter the content for review or import it from a URL. Assess the tool’s readability, tone of voice, and SEO recommendations. Implement these suggestions to enhance your content’s readability and increase its organic visibility.
Use Smart Writer features to rephrase existing content or expand on passages. Select any highlighted phrase, sentence, or paragraph to access Smart Writer recommendations (such as “Simplify” in the example below).
Click on a recommendation to implement the change automatically.
Review the AI-generated content and choose to “Accept,” “Reject,” or “Try again.”
- Content Translation
For an international audience, consider publishing content in multiple languages.
Use tools like Copy.ai to translate entire blog posts or generate short social media posts in over 30 languages.
Conclusion
AI-generated content can transform your marketing strategy with efficiency and scalability. However, navigating AI-generated content requires expertise and strategic oversight. At Estes Media, we specialize in guiding businesses through digital marketing complexities. Whether you’re a construction company or a startup, we ensure your SEO strategy aligns with the latest trends. Contact us for tailored digital marketing solutions that drive success in today’s competitive landscape. Let’s elevate your digital strategy together. Partner with Estes Media to elevate your online presence and achieve sustainable growth.
