Why AI Content Isn’t Working (and What to Do for Your Blog Instead)

Over the past couple of years, bloggers, search optimizers, and marketers have tried to harness the power of generative AI for creating content and promoting themselves. While AI content is certainly impressive, it hasn’t led to the results that many people expected.

Why is this the case? Why doesn’t AI content work as well as many people expected? And what should you do for your blog instead?

The Importance of Quality Content

If you want your blog to succeed, you need to produce high-quality content. According to The Blog Starter, “Each post should be lengthy, informative, and engaging. It’s not always easy to come up with new blog post ideas on a regular basis and you are free to mix up the tone and even the subject matter to keep things lively and interesting. It’s your space, after all. But there are a few elements that each and every piece of content should endeavor to include.”

This is important from both a user experience standpoint and a technical standpoint. If you don’t have good content, there’s no reason for people to visit your blog. Even if you’ve produced good content in the past, a single bad post can be enough to turn off a loyal follower forever. On top of that, good content is important for building authority in the eyes of search engines. Without quality posts, no SEO strategy is going to be effective.

Quality posts are:

Accurate: Good posts should be technically accurate, with details that can be verified elsewhere on the internet. Misleading or deceiving readers will not go over well.

Valuable: Your work should also be valuable to readers in some way. Often, this means providing them with information, entertainment, or both.

Readable: Blog posts should be easy to read, with simple vocabulary, formatting that’s easy on the eyes, and approachable phrasing. Posts should also be clear and concise.

Original: Good works are original, with totally novel phrasing and unique ideas. Ideally, you won’t be able to find anything else like it on the web.

Relatable: Finally, quality content should be relatable. People should be able to connect to your writing in a direct, personal way. Authenticity is increasingly important in an era of distrust.

The Promise of AI Content

Generative AI has partially disrupted the world of online content development, giving millions of people an easily accessible tool that can, ostensibly, produce decent, technically original content at incredible speeds. You can try it out for yourself, using a simple prompt to generate an article in mere seconds.

At first glance, this content is accurate, easy to read, and reasonably original, so the fact that it can be generated quickly and cheaply is a massive advantage in SEO and online marketing. However, people who began to lean almost exclusively on AI content haven’t seen the results they thought they would.

Why is this the case?

Why AI Content Falls Flat

AI generated content falls flat in a few key ways:

Factual Errors

Thanks to AI hallucinations, there is no way to totally trust the accuracy or reliability of AI generated content. While much of the content generated tends to be accurate, there is no guarantee of this, and factual inaccuracies can easily slip you by. If people see grossly incorrect information on your blog, they will no longer trust you.

Misguided Prompts

The quality of AI generated content is heavily dependent on the quality of the prompts fed to the AI. If your prompts are thin, vague, or otherwise not conducive to facilitating the creation of good content, you’ll inevitably be disappointed with the results.

Repetitiveness

Most people can tell when they’re reading a piece of content generated by AI. That’s because AI engines tend to rely on pattern recognition, so they end up repeating similar formulas over and over. The result is usually a stale piece with little charm.

Lack of Personality

There’s also no real personality or authenticity in the work created by AI. Sure, you can ask an AI to fabricate a personal experience, but it’s not going to feel as real as one genuinely recited by a human being who lived it.

What to Do Instead

Write original, authentic content.

The vast majority of your blog content should be original, authentic content written by a human being. Ideally, it should be based on personal experience – and it should highlight your unique personality. AI struggles with writing truly original content and it doesn’t have any genuine personal experiences to share, so this is your chance to shine as a human writer.

Do something that AI can’t.

Simply regurgitating a simple step-by-step tutorial is something that AI can handle easily, so instead, focus on developing content that AI simply can’t handle. AI rarely gives “opinions,” and when it does, those opinions are totally uncontroversial, so consider becoming a bolder, more active thought leader in your work.

Use AI wisely.

If you do decide to use AI tools, use them in pursuit of creating quality content. Generative AI can be extremely useful in researching, brainstorming topics, outlining, and even drafting, but if you rely on it exclusively for generating content, you’re probably going to regret it. By choosing the right tool, you can improve the quality of the output. By using that tool sparingly, you can keep your content authentic.

Closely monitor new publications.

If you publish anything that was, in any way, generated by AI, thoroughly proofread and fact check it before putting it on your blog.

AI content is no substitute for human writers, nor is it a cheap way to master the arts of SEO and blogging. However, there’s no need to totally dismiss generative AI or refuse to use it in any capacity. What’s important is that you recognize both the strengths and the weaknesses of AI generated content, and that you use AI tools in a way that allows you to produce the best quality content for your blog.