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Warning, the following opinion may be controversial: the panic that AI is here to snatch jobs away from writers is overblown. 

The real story? Writers who’ve befriended AI are owning the game. Here’s why.

• Quality writing is still essential for attracting and maintaining human interest and ranking in search (see Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines).
• Quality writing requires ideation, multiple drafts, and editing. AI hasn’t replaced these steps. In fact, studies show it’s not good at reasoning, backtracking, and editing. 
• My experience of spending hundreds of hours honing an AI writing process confirms that producing quality writing with AI still requires a multistep process that non-writers are unlikely to sustain.

Quality content is still king

Quality writing is central to effective communication, education, credibility, and engagement. Quality writing ensures that the intended message is delivered clearly and effectively, without confusion or misinterpretation. Quality writing is key in persuasion. Quality writing turns casual browsers into regular readers, and regular readers into loyal fans or customers.

And nothing—absolutely nothing—beats the human mind at recognizing quality. Google values human opinion so much that they highly prize authoritative links to prove humans found content worthwhile—a hard hurdle to clear. So, if you give Google a page with high bounce rates and low time-on-page, it’ll drop that page’s ranking like a sinking ship. To make the top of the search results, a page’s writing has to be good. A great way to see that in action is to look at what happens to sites with bad writing.

Let’s discuss an intriguing experiment by a digital marketing firm, Fractl. They created a site called ThisMarketingBlogDoesNotExist.com, consisting of hundreds of pages of AI-generated content. They said they made it in something like 20 minutes. The idea was that if the content quantity could be massively scaled up, it could dominate search rankings. However, the results from Stephen Jeske’s analysis showed that the traffic and keyword trends for the site were lackluster and eventually declined. The PR coverage the site received didn’t significantly increase traffic and the top organic keywords for the site needed to be more relevant and impressive. Most of the site’s backlinks targeted the homepage rather than individual articles, suggesting the articles themselves were not of high quality or interest.

As a result, the site did not gain meaningful search engine rankings or traffic, which are key indicators of SEO performance​.

So what went wrong? Google’s E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) determined that the site was low-quality. A closer look at the content quality revealed that the AI-generated articles objectively lacked substance, with most being much shorter than the target word count. Jeske noticed that the articles were 673 words on average. This is because AI text generators can’t handle much more than 1,000 words, with most becoming incoherent after three hundred or so. The articles only achieved 33% of the target content score (based on MarketMuse’s SEO scoring model).

Back in 2018, Google started using their E-E-A-T model to improve their rankings. Here’s a quick look at what happened to the traffic for sites that had low quality content after Google rolled out E-E-A-T:

As you can see, you can’t cut corners on quality content and still expect to win search traffic.

The AI Bullet Point Sandwich

The prime example of low-quality writing from AI is the bullet point sandwich. A bullet-point sandwich comes from doing a single AI prompt that produces an intro paragraph, a list of 5-10 bullet points, and a conclusion paragraph. It’s super boring. 

Single-prompt AI content is a quick, but it often leads to poor-quality outcomes. This kind of low-quality stuff can lead to inaccuracies, tone-deaf messaging, or just plain old boring content. The cost? Your brand reputation, reader engagement, and potential business opportunities take a massive hit. So, using AI as a lone ranger for content creation is not the best idea.

Quality writing with AI doesn’t mean skipping steps, it means doing them faster

The process for producing good writing isn’t some mystical, unrepeatable ritual. It’s a craft honed by a mix of inspiration, multiple drafts, and diligent editing. If you’ve spent countless hours fine-tuning an AI writing process, you’ll know that creating quality writing with AI still needs time, skill, and much writerly talent. Nothing can beat the quality that comes from the time-tested steps of creating a compelling narrative. The best writing is an emotional journey from the spark of an idea to the final, polished piece. It’s a process of research, drafts, edits, fact-checking, and proofreading. The result is something that really speaks to the reader. And you don’t need to trust me that AI can’t pull that off. Studies show it.

Research conducted by Chu-Cheng Lin, a PhD candidate at the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science, revealed that AI, specifically autoregressive models, have certain limitations. To be clear, ChatGPT is an autoregressive model, which means it’s guessing the next word to write. These models can generate human-like text but cannot form consistent arguments without errors. They have a linear thought process that doesn’t allow them to use reasoning, backtrack, edit, or change their work like a human writer might. Furthermore, the models don’t give the computer enough time to “think” ahead about what it should say after the next word, leading to potential nonsense. The more text these models produce, the more obvious their mistakes become​.

In other words: Quality writing is still a human’s game.

AI is your new, super smart coworker ready to help you with unlimited time, patience, and knowledge 

Here’s the twist: AI isn’t the villain in this story. It’s the sidekick! AI can be a super useful tool for a great writer that boosts productivity, helps shatter writer’s block, and enhances content quality. The catch? No single AI tool can do it all.

The real magic happens when the writer and AI team up. Alex Samuel wrote a fantastic piece detailing her process. She goes deep into amazingly detailed methods for generating quality writing using AI. Essentially, the writer directs the AI to churn out a first draft quickly. Then, our human writer steps in to refine and elevate that draft into something that’s truly engaging. 

I also find the best results for my writing using multiple tools. For example, I prefer Grammarly for editing after I generate my initial drafts in ChatGPT. I also use tools like MarketMuse to tune my content for SEO, which also acts as a helpful thesaurus. Finally, I check for plagiarism using PlagScan, which ensures my content is original and will not get hit with a duplicate content penalty from Google.

When good writers partner with AI, we can produce high-quality content that takes hours, not days, to create. It’s like breaking the old rule that says you can only have two out of three: fast, cheap, and good.

Gifted writers use AI to produce phenomenal content at lightning speed. So, don’t be fooled; AI isn’t taking jobs away from writers. Writers using AI are taking over.