AI and writing (and content creation in general) are becoming more intertwined with each passing year. According to Statista, 42% of global marketing and media businesses use AI tools for writing and content generation. Another Statista survey indicates that 86% of students use AI for their homework globally.
AI isn’t a passing trend. Instead, it’s causing significant changes in almost every industry, especially writing. With these changes come new industry trends and best practices writers should adopt to utilize AI effectively, ethically, and creatively.
How Technology Is Changing How We Write
Writers have always drawn inspiration from other sources. Books, studies, artwork, experiences—all of these have acted as the jumping off point for every author, copywriter, or student turning in a last-minute essay. In a way, AI could fit this umbrella. Humans can use popular chatbots or AI writers to:
- Make content creation easier: Type an idea, outline, or rubric into your LLM of choice and watch it generate first drafts for articles, blogs, essays, emails, social media captions, ad copy, etc. You can use this first draft as inspiration for your own work, or tweak the result until it matches your needs. AI writing tools take away the panic of staring at a blank page.
- Simplify research: Google revolutionized the information ecosystem from writers and researchers having to comb through books at a library or requesting paper studies to typing their query and scrolling. Now, AI is taking the next step by cutting out the middleman of a search engine and giving you exactly what you ask for.
- Rising productivity: AI’s greatest potential benefit is its ability to improve humans’ lives. For life-and-death industries, this could mean that AI or robots are exposed to hazardous chemicals instead of humans. But for writers, marketers, and media businesses, AI can improve productivity. It can take on menial tasks like spellchecking, generating citations, or developing a content outline so that these workers can focus on more fulfilling, important projects.
These are all positive examples of what AI can do if used responsibly for writing. AI can act as another tool in a creative’s kit, like a computer. Where it goes wrong is if it’s used to replace human writing entirely. In this version, artificial intelligence could negatively impact the writing process and information through repetitive writing, misinformation, and substituting thinking and creative reasoning.
4 Emerging AI Trends for Writers
Whether or not you use AI tools, you should be aware of key trends in the space that could impact the way you create (and digest) content.
1. Stronger AI Regulations and Industry-Level Ethics Guidelines
AI is advancing quickly, and regulators are taking time to catch up. However, AI-focused regulations are coming to ensure everyone can take advantage of its transformative potential while managing associated risks. On a large scale, copyright battles continue to brew as AI companies like Google and Alphabet face accusations of stealing artwork through their image generators. It’s not impossible to imagine how these same issues could soon plague the writing world as well. An author could come across a piece generated by an LLM that copies their work verbatim or in large chunks. The same goes for songwriting. An AI tool could use the work of musician without their permission.
Regulators are also working to make AI disclosures required. You may already see these tags on social media, or even on some blogs or articles written with the help of AI.
Expect the focus to shift towards AI regulations and ethics as the tools continue advancing.
2. Hyper-Personalization
Consumers expect brands to personalize their experience based on their needs. This is becoming a reality with AI writing tools because they can hyper-personalize content. This type of content increases engagement because it enables you to cater to the needs of your audience.
Hyper-personalization will become a part of your content strategy. It lets you personalize blog posts, email newsletters, marketing messages, and other content types for specific audiences.
3. Devaluing of 100% AI-Derived Content
Although AI writing tools are incredible in speeding up content creation, they aren’t the best for creativity. These services are vulnerable to hallucination, i.e., they can make things up. They lack emotional intelligence and don’t understand how to connect with readers. On top of that, search engines like Google and Bing are penalizing AI content for failing to provide value to readers.
In other words, it’s no longer a good practice to use the content generated by AI tools as is.
To create meaningful, enriched content, AI needs human writers. Artificial intelligence can help create first drafts, and human writers can edit and improve the content. Additionally, human writers will add their unique experiences and creativity to improve the content.
4. Increased Importance of AI Content Detectors
There is a growing need for AI content detectors because of the popularity of AI writing tools. It’s becoming harder for these services to detect AI content because AI-powered tools are improving at mimicking human writers.
This is why false positives, i.e., wrongly identifying human content as AI, are common among these services. However, these detection tools are evolving and are introducing new ways to show that the work is from human writers.
For example, a recent case study compared top detection tools like ZeroGPT, Copyleaks, Undetectable, and Smodin. The study compared the LLMs in terms of detection 100% AI writing, 0% AI text, and mixed content (60% AI, 40% human). The results showed that while most detectors could identify text that was completely AI or completely human with little trouble, most struggled with mixed content. Out of the 10 tools benchmarked, Smodin’s AI detector (here is the link) got the closest to perfectly identifying mixed text. Alt Text: An advertisement with a black background and white text on a wall.
5 Best Practices for Using AI in Writing
Here are five best practices you should follow when using AI in writing.
1. Use AI Writing Tools As Your Assistant
A common mistake people make is using AI tools to write content on their behalf. Although this can work, there are several issues with this process. For starters, your content can sound bland, especially for long-form content. Additionally, AI tends to regurgitate the same ideas, sentence patterns, and words, causing your work to become redundant. And at worst, AI can “hallucinate”, meaning it generates false information and presents it as fact.
If you’re not careful, your audience will easily notice these issues, affecting your credibility. Instead, you should use AI writing tools as your assistant. It can help with brainstorming ideas, especially when you can’t think of anything.
Use it to refine your content and see where you can improve. It can also highlight grammatical and spelling mistakes, helping you clean up your content and make it look professional.
2. Always Double-Check AI-Generated Content
AI writing tools save time and effort because you can create content at scale. However, as highlighted earlier, they’re not perfect. If you don’t spot these errors and publish your content, your audience will quickly point them out.
This will negatively impact your reputation and trustworthiness. Nowadays, most AI writing tools provide sources for their statements, so you can double-check their accuracy.
Lastly, keep in mind that these tools can have biases due to their training data. Identifying these biases is essential, especially when you want to stay neutral or provide a balanced overview.
3. Use AI To Help Analyze Videos and Other Long-Form Content for Research
You don’t have to watch videos from start to finish to follow the conversation and understand the topic of discussion. Instead, you can use AI tools to transcribe videos. Once you have this text-based content, ask an AI tool to analyze the transcript and highlight key points.
It can even simplify complex topics, especially when the content is full of technical jargon. If you’re unfamiliar with the topic of discussion, it can be harder to understand the subject. Thankfully, AI writing tools can summarize just about anything and ensure you don’t feel overwhelmed.
4. Be Specific With Your Prompts
If you provide vague, generic, or open-ended instructions, the AI writing tool will produce run-of-the-mill content. For example, you want an AI-powered tool to write a blog about headphones. In this case, if you want the tool to talk about specific brands of headphones, you must provide this information.
You can also be specific about the tone and writing style. In other words, the more guidance you provide these AI writing tools, the better the results.
5. Add Unique Perspectives
Although AI writing tools are excellent research assistants, you still won’t get the complete picture about the topic of discussion. You should focus on digging deeper, i.e., learning more about the subject. This way, you can identify and add unique viewpoints to your content.
If you have any thoughts or opinions, including them in your work is a good idea. Personal experiences and examples can also give your content a unique touch.
Collaboration Is the Future
AI is changing writing forever, but it can’t replace human writers, at least in the near future. These tools still need human input to ensure they provide high-quality results. Generic content is out, and hyper-personalized content is the future.
As a writer, you need to work with AI tools because it is the new way of creating content. Understanding how to use these tools and incorporating the above best practices ensures you get quality content. It also ensures you’re well-equipped to make the most of this technology as it gets better with every update.