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Will AI Replace You as a Writer?

TLDR; In the future, you may spend most of your time editing AI content instead of writing articles from scratch. If you write highly technical or personal content, AI likely won’t impact you.

If writing is a major part of your career or business, the thought of AI programs rapidly generating content is truly worrisome.

It raises questions like:

  • Is AI going to replace me?
  • Is there content I can focus on that AI can’t create?
  • Should I start using AI to write too?

To answer these questions, you need an understanding of the capabilities of AI writers, and that’s what we’ll look at in this post.

What are AI writers good at?

AI writers have a few advantages over human writers.

The most important advantage is their ability to write much faster than people.

Writing way faster than people

It’s not that the AI content is better than human-written content (it’s worse, in fact), but if the AI can write an article in 2 minutes when it takes a person 2 hours, then that changes the game.

If you can spend 30 minutes editing that article into something you can publish, then you’ve saved a lot of time and greatly increased your profit potential.

So AI is not at the point where it can generate ready-to-publish content, but it is good enough to write articles that can be edited into something great. Just a few years ago, the content was so bad it wasn’t even worth editing, so this is a major step forward.

AI is also good at including real-world facts to write content that appears well-researched.

Writing factual content

What might surprise you is how good AI has gotten at writing factual articles. For instance, here’s a snippet taken from an article I generated with Article Forge:

article forge content snippet
Find more content samples in my full review

To write that article, I entered the keyword “best hotels in Copenhagen.” That’s it.

Obviously, it needs some editing for style and flow, but it’s incredible how much detail it included. And you can look that info up, by the way. That’s an actual hotel that opened in 2019.

If you struggle with writer’s block or starting new articles, you might appreciate how good AI is at outlining.

Outlining articles

It’s nearly impossible to write a good article without outlining it first, but sometimes, it’s hard to get started.

AI is excellent at creating outlines, which can get you into the writing zone much faster. For instance, here are some outlines generated by Writesonic for an article about Keto diets:

writesonic article writer outline
The input is on the left and the outlines are on the right.

Unlike a person, the AI never gets writer’s block or runs out of ideas. That’s why they can be a good source of inspiration for entirely new articles too.

So if AI can rapidly write factual articles and generate creative outlines, is there any reason not to use them?

What are AI writers bad at?

While most writers can benefit from AI in some way, it still has many limitations.

Here are a few of those weaknesses.

Ordered content

For AI, writing ordered content, like a step-by-step tutorial, is a real challenge.

The AI doesn’t understand the concept it’s writing about, so it can’t put the steps into a logical order. For instance, a tutorial about “how to write an article” might start with editing and end with researching the topic. It just won’t make any sense.

To be fair, not every AI writer has this issue. Jasper, for instance, functions more like a writing assistant, so you can outline the steps in advance to avoid this issue.

If you plan on using AI to write tutorials, you’ll want to go with a semi-automated tool like Jasper or avoid using AI altogether.

Expert & highly technical content

AI can write knowledgeable content by inserting facts, like in the snippet I shared above. However, facts don’t constitute real expertise.

For instance, you wouldn’t want to use AI to write an article like, “How to Use Raycasting in Video Game Development.” The topic is just too technical. The AI might do an okay job of explaining what raycasting is, but it’s not going to be able to give readers good advice on how to use raycasting, and it certainly won’t include code snippets.

But when I say “highly technical” I really mean highly technical. For instance, you might think that AI can’t write an article explaining how weather balloons work, but here’s the introduction from a draft generated by Article Forge on this topic:

weather balloon ai content

Now, if you tried to go deeper into this topic, that’s when you would run into problems.

Here’s a good way to think about this limitation: AI can write content for beginners, but it can’t write content for experts. In other words, a layman would want to know in general how weather balloons work, and AI can handle that. But if that person spends time learning how to make their own weather balloons, the new content they seek will include questions AI isn’t capable of answering.

Editorial content

This probably goes without saying, but if your writing involves a high degree of personality and backstory then AI probably can’t help at all.

AI doesn’t try to assume a persona and won’t fake a backstory or other personal details. This is an area where it’s not designed to function at all, but that could change in the future.

The big takeaway

Now that you’re aware of AI’s strengths and weaknesses, let’s put it in perspective.

The number #1 benefit of AI is that it can write articles way faster than people. If the content is introductory, AI can write an excellent article filled with accurate factual information.

If you’re mainly writing beginner-level content, AI is going to have a big influence on you. You should take AI seriously and look into how you can use it to speed up your own workflow and create content faster.

If you write highly technical or editorialized content, AI probably won’t have much use for you even if you’re keen to try it out. You may be able to use it to brainstorm new article ideas or write other forms of content like Tweets or email copy, but it won’t be practical for the articles you write any time soon.

If you want to see the AI tools that everyone is using and talking about, I’d recommend taking a look at the Top Picks page next:

The Best AI Writers on the Market

If you have something to share on this topic, go ahead and post a comment below, and if you found this article thought-provoking, share it with someone else who might like it too.

Thanks for reading!

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