Why You Should Always Combine AI Tools WITH Editorial Expertise
If your day-to-day involves content creation, in your gut, you know that everything’s changed.
Artificial intelligence, and in particular Large Language Models (LLMs) started transforming the landscape near the end of 2022, led by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Six months later, LLMs are being implemented into everything, at a near-frantic pace. Imagine what the world will look like in two years!?
Before we start losing our minds about the implications, the fact of the matter is that although it’s a completely transformative technology, it isn’t accurate sentient artificial intelligence. It doesn’t understand context and can’t think for itself.
In short, it’s an extremely fast and mostly reliable Parrot.
This means that in order to truly leverage these AI tools to create quality content that is original and search-optimized, you need to include a layer of editorial expertise to the process. In this article, we dive into the capabilities, benefits and limitations of AI tools, and how to ensure you’re creating content that’s valuable for your audience (and ultimately gets them to convert).
How is Artificial Intelligence Applied to Content Creation?
Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that allows machines to learn from their experiences, adjust to new inputs, and perform human-like tasks.
When applied to content creation, AI can generate text, images, and videos based on patterns and data.
Diving into a specific example, we’ve seen first-hand how invaluable AI can be in crafting successful Hispanic content marketing campaigns. Thanks to its natural language processing capabilities, the AI helps personalize and optimize content for the Hispanic market. It does so by leveraging data it’s garnered across the web on past U.S. Hispanic campaigns and is able to identify relevant commonalities to the one currently being worked on. Using this data it’s able to provide suggested copy that gets the human content creator about 70% of the way there.
Personally, I like to think about it like an extremely knowledgeable and effective writing assistant, that’s void of creativity.
The Benefits of AI-Powered Content Creation
Aside from assisting in creating a single piece of content, what’s particularly exciting about these new AI tools is the speed at which it can reformat content for other channels. With one originating piece of content, you could easily produce dozens of others in a variety of formats. For instance, a blog post could be transformed into multiple social media posts, a script for a video, an infographic, a downloadable mini-course and almost anything else you can think of.
Now, mind you none of them will be perfect, and they’ll all require editorial expertise to get across the line, but you will be saving hundreds of hours of work across all your projects and content formats.
In addition to saving you time on content creation, it’s also a huge help when it comes to research and ideation. But before we can explain more, it’s important we share this warning: Always ask Chat GPT or whatever LLM you’re using to provide you with sources and citations (here’s a helpful guide on how to do so).
By leveraging the vast knowledge an LLM has access to, you’ll be able to ask, and have answered, critical questions about a topic before you begin the content creation process. Thanks to this process you can quickly ascertain the most pertinent information and leverage that to create more relevant and discerning content.
The Limitations of AI-Powered Content Creation
As you may or may not know, these types of AI tools sometimes make stuff up, or Hallucinate.
How does that happen?
Keep in mind that ChatGPT doesn’t generate its answers by looking for the information in a database. Instead, it draws on patterns it learned in its training. This means “its answers are based more on patterns than on facts”.
For example, if you ask ChatGPT to tell you about “computer engineering courses”, it’s not thinking “what do I know about computer engineering courses”, instead it asks “what do statements about computer engineering courses most commonly look like” and it provides an answer based on the patterns it identifies in those common statements.
In addition to this reliability issue, it’s also important to consider its limitations related to creativity and search optimization. In short, ChatGPT isn’t capable of real creativity. It can mesh together pre-existing content to turn it into something new, but it’s not going to do any of the critical thinking necessary to create something truly unique.
In addition, there are still a number of buggy aspects to these tools when trying to search optimize your content. Things like longer word counts, adding headers and subheaders, including keywords a precise number of times, are all still a challenge for AI tools.
At Conversa Strategies, we’ve overcome many of these particular challenges by building a custom content builder using ChatGPT’s API, however, not everyone has that option. If you’re using ChatGPT or other similar LLMs, you may come across some of these same challenges so be aware and prepare to work around it.
Or you could simply:
Create valuable content with a mixed approach - AI + Editorial
I hope that now that you’ve considered the benefits and limitations of using AI tools, it’s clear that it isn’t as simple as clicking a button. In order to create valuable, search-optimized content the only sustainable way forward is leveraging editorial experts in the process.
Putting all our cards on the table, that’s the path Conversa Strategies has taken. As soon as ChatGPT was publicly available, as veteran content marketers and SEO experts, we understood the importance of integrating this new technology into our production process. It would mean greater speed, efficiency and productivity, and that’s a no-brainer!
We quickly learned, as we plunged into prompt engineering, that it would require a lot of hand-holding.
These tools could help, but they’re still just tools. If a tool is in the hands of an expert carver, you’ll get Michaelangelo’s David; if it’s in the hands of an amateur, you’ll get a nice paperweight. The same is true for LLM’s like ChatGPT.
Artificial intelligence for Spanish content
Although artificial intelligence can be a powerful tool for content creation, it's essential to understand its limitations around things like cultural differences and colloquialisms. Specifically, when writing texts in Spanish, we’ve found that AI tools were unable to fully adapt to the grammatical and cultural differences between different dialects/origins.
This increases the need for editorial vigilance when creating content in Spanish using AI tools like ChatGPT.
In addition, if you’re creating bilingual content, we highly recommend reviewing translations extremely carefully. It’s better than Google Translate was, but it still lacks any linguistic nuance. This results in extremely mediocre translations that never quite hit the mark, until you get a professional copy-editor to spruce it up.
Still, the bottom-line is that thanks to LLMs, we’ve seen research, ideation and production times halved and we’re still at the start of this AI revolution.
I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about the future!
What are my options?
AI can offer efficiency and data-based insights, while editorial experience can ensure the quality and relevance of the content. If you’re not sure how to hit that perfect formula, we may have a good option for you.
Conversa Strategies is the best of both worlds - we produce AI-powered content with an expert human touch.
Our process is straight-forward:
Human & AI - SEO research to discover keywords with lowest competition and highest volume.
AI - Utilize proprietary Content Engine (leveraging ChatGPT’s API.)
Human - Copy-edit and add additional sections where relevant.
Human - Implement conversion-optimization best practices.
By following this 4 step process, we’re able to leverage AI tools and editorial expertise in perfect concert. And it’s thanks to this strategy that we’ve been able to get our clients over 250,000 organic visitors a month and ranking in the top 3 results for more than 9,000 keywords.
We’ve worked with companies from a variety of sectors, including fintech, healthcare, education and social media, among others. Aside from AI expertise, our team has a profound understanding of the Hispanic market, which allows us to guide businesses in enhancing their Hispanic marketing campaigns.
Whether you’re looking for English, Bilingual or Spanish content marketing with a slice of AI - Conversa Strategies can provide the best of both worlds.
JUST REMEMBER: whatever you decide to do, although artificial intelligence is a powerful tool, it can't replace the human touch. The experience, intuition, and cultural understanding of a human editor remain essential for creating high-quality content.
Be wary of anything that promises an ‘all-in-one’ solution that will completely replace the need for human editors. It’s smoke and mirrors and ultimately testing those things out will just damage your brand’s reputation.
All of that said, if you’re still not sure about your options or you want to discuss how to integrate AI into your existing content strategy, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re a bunch of technology nerds at Conversa, we’d love to chat.
Frequently asked questions
Can artificial intelligence completely replace human editors?
No, AI is a tool that can assist the human editors at Conversa Strategies to be more efficient and effective. Human editors remain essential for ensuring the quality and relevance of content.
How does Conversa Strategies ensure its content is relevant and appealing to the Hispanic market?
Conversa Strategies utilizes AI to analyze data and discover patterns, trends, and preferences in the Hispanic market. Then, these insights are used to guide content creation.