How to Approach Content Creation in the Age of AI

The release of artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Jasper has irreversibly changed the landscape of content creation. With these tools, you can generate blogs, social media posts, emails, and more in mere minutes. But while AI offers opportunities to save time and scale up content production, it raises important questions about authenticity, originality, and accuracy. 

This blog provides an overview of how AI can help businesses with content production, what limitations it has, and what to watch out for to ensure your content remains authentic in the age of AI.

What is an LLM?

A Large Language Model (LLM) is a type of artificial intelligence program designed to understand, generate, and manipulate human language. ChatGPT, Gemini, and Bard are all examples of LLMs. They are trained on the vast amounts of data available on the internet, which allows them to learn language patterns and generate content, including answers to questions, translations, and summaries of information. 

If you are using or are interested in using AI to produce content of any kind, then an LLM is what will help you do so. Here are a few specific ways to leverage this technology and save time with content.

6 Ways to Use AI in Content Production

AI can play a helpful role in many stages of the content creation process. Here are a few key tasks it can help with so that the humans on your team have more time to focus on the parts of content that require deep insight, expertise, and creativity.

Use AI to Brainstorm Content Ideas

From brainstorming potential blog topics to coming up with photo captions and everything in between, AI can help. Whether you’re starting from scratch in developing a content strategy or looking for ideas to fill out a content calendar for blogs or social media, using an LLM is a great way to generate angles and topics you may not have otherwise thought of.

Use AI as a Free Research Assistant

The process of reading long reports, scouring websites for statistics, and sourcing other niche information is time consuming. AI can scan and summarize information and present it in a condensed, easily understandable way that speeds up the process of gathering the details you need to produce content.

Create Outlines With AI 

It’s always easier to write when you have a clear structure for the information you are trying to convey to your audience. AI can help you create content skeletons with headings and subheadings that keep you on track and speed up the writing process.

Draft Content Pieces With AI

Just as you can generate an outline to help inspire your writing, you can also manually create your outline and use AI to help flesh out each section and create a coherent draft. With the right prompts, you can even use AI to rephrase your content with a specific voice or tone that suits your brand. 

Repurpose Content With AI

As a business owner, time is limited. That means you probably want to get the most out of the content you produce and ensure it is reaching target customers wherever they may be. AI can repurpose content so it can be shared in different formats. This could be repurposing a blog by turning it into a social media post, a YouTube video script, an email sequence, or a LinkedIn update. The possibilities are endless! 

Use AI to Localize Content for Specific Markets 

Sometimes when you produce a piece of content, you need to tweak it to make it relevant for different audiences. AI can help you alter a piece of content in a way that ensures it appeals to people in specific industries, geographies, age groups, or any other group. It can also help with translation into other languages (though of course, as with all content, this should always be carefully checked for accuracy).

Limitations of AI for Content Production: Why a Human Touch Matters More Than Ever

Now that we’ve covered some broad ways that you can use AI to improve the efficiency of content production, it’s important to remember its limitations. While it’s now mainstream to use AI tools to summarize large documents, generate content outlines, and help with all sorts of writing, there are also many examples emerging that remind us that AI can and does make mistakes.

Think of AI as a Collaborator, Not a Replacement

What AI can do is amazing, but it’s important to remember that it is not a substitute for human experience, insight, and emotional intelligence. You don’t want your content to be regurgitated information with no originality. When incorporating AI into your workflow, think of it as an enhancement, not a replacement.

Strategy, brand voice, and trust remain human responsibilities when producing content. To build trust with your audience, you still need to understand their emotional drivers and pain points and tailor information to their needs. You also need to ensure your content is strategically aligned with your business goals. 

The Content AI Produces is Only as Good as the Prompts You Provide

As the saying goes, garbage in, garbage out. Prompt engineering is the art and science of crafting precise inputs that help guide generative AI models to produce the output you want. The more detailed your requests are with generative AI, the better the content produced will be. 

Always Fact-Check Content Generated by AI

AI does not guarantee factual accuracy or contextual sensitivity (in fact, most LLMs include a disclaimer that mistakes are possible). Any content drafted using AI should always be carefully reviewed by a human member of your team who has knowledge and lived experience regarding the topic. 

Recently, a  prominent newspaper (read the article on CBC) published a summer reading list that included books that don’t exist. As it turns out, AI was used to generate the article and it somehow made it to print without anyone realizing it was made up, leaving the online community to point out this oversight. This embarrassing outcome could have been avoided if the writer or editors had reviewed the AI-generated content for accuracy.

AI is Here to Stay…Learn How to Embrace It

AI is an indispensable tool for businesses, but like any tool, you need to use it the right way to ensure you get the outcome you want. We’ve discussed elsewhere how AI is transforming the way we use Google Ads, and now you know how it plays a role in overall content creation too. 

Need help developing an AI-assisted content strategy tailored to your business or industry? The Yardstick team has helped companies from a range of industries attract leads with regular high-quality content production, paid advertising strategies, and more. Let’s talk about how we can do the same for you.