I, For One, Welcome Our New AI Writing Overlords.

You’ve seen the articles on Vocal and Medium. AI writing is all the rave these days. Why put in the work yourself when you can just punch in a bunch of related keywords and just let the AI spit out a semi-coherent story for your readers to digest.

I guess for some of you the prospect of handing off writing work to a machine learning algorithm is exciting. I’m not sure why. We got into the business of writing because we love writing, right? So why are we now more than happy to hand it off to the machines?

When science fiction writers wrote about the robot uprising none of them mentioned machines barging into my room to rip the keyboard right out of my grubby little hands.

Well, it’s not all bad. There are ways in which AI writing can improve the future of the our craft, without excluding humans, for the better.

It can help with writer’s block.

It’s true. You don’t need an AI utility to write the entire article for you, it can be used to help you flesh out ideas that are already in your head. Maybe you’re having trouble putting the words together on a given subject. Well, AI can help shape your thoughts into something cohesive and allow you to do the rest of the work yourself.

I tested one AI writing website, copy.ai, that can allow you to generate talking points to whole articles. You could follow through and produce an entire story that could be copied and pasted to Medium, Vocal or your own blog, but you could also just stick to the talking points it gives. It’s a great way to gather your thoughts without having all the work done for you.

Assist with social media marketing.

I tend to find marketing myself on social media tedious. Unfortunately, I find that it is a necessity as a writer to advertise my own work on these sites. It’s something I would rather not be bothered with personally but it’s a great task that can be handed off to an AI writer that has learned to understand the ins-and-outs of what makes a social media post viral.

It can make SEO writing less tedious.

After taking a few SEO courses this summer, I personally find SEO focused writing boring as hell. It’s focused on learning “viral” keywords and phrases that will help your website, article, or blog rank as high as possible on Google. The concept is not that difficult at all, and I think a lot of us use popular vernacular naturally when we write.

That said, there’s still a science to SEO. You want to ensure you are using the right words and phrases while also not doing anything to anger the Google search index algorithm. When I am writing most of my work, I pay no mind to the entire SEO process. I don’t want it to affect my stream-of-consciousness to the page.

That being said, it’s an important tool to get eyeballs on your website or blog if you’re trying to attract an audience.

Writing SEO focused copy is something an AI writer can excel at. If you’re like me and hate the thought of doing SEO research when all you want to do is write articles about technology and video games, an AI can be a handy tool.

Now, you might have noticed that throughout this article I had images of another article written with the same title. Well, this is a similar article to my own spit out by the copy.ai website. It took me about five minutes to produce. I initially considered just copying and pasting the actual text into this story to show a full-blown example of AI writing when it’s allowed to do all the work, but that felt like cheating. Instead, I decided to extract images of the text so that it didn’t artificially bloat my word count.

As you can see, the AI writer is good. It’s more than a little scary.

The one thing it can’t replicate is the human experience. No matter how much a machine learns to write like a human it can never share the unique vision of a flesh and blood human being. Our unique point-of-view as an entire species is not something to be taken for granted. No matter how good the AI writer gets, we can at least take a little solace in that.