How Effective Are AI Tools for Blogging? 5 Questions to Answer
Artificial intelligence, usually referenced as “AI”, is a hot topic. It has many applications that can boost productivity and solve problems. One such application is content creation, where given a prompt, AI tools can generate content for you. This especially happens in the blogging field where bloggers can automate the creation of posts.
While many have chosen to embrace AI tools and use them, many question whether AI will kill blogging. It’s understandable as there’s no reason to conduct your own research and write a blog post yourself when AI can do all of that within a matter of seconds.
Despite how powerful AI is though, I don’t think you will have to worry if it will kill blogging. While AI can automate blogging, it is far from perfect. In this article, I looked into 5 questions regarding using AI tools for blogging and its effectiveness and played around with some AI tools to find out.
Can AI Tools write high-quality articles?
It’s well known that AI tools can write entire articles, but how is the quality of those articles? I’ve tried a few tools and it varies. Some results were not too bad while others were lacking. What I can conclude in general though, is that they all needed further revision.
Here’s an example of an article I generated about selecting the right dog breed using a service called, Writesonic.
Although AI can generate an article with ease, here are some observations to point out:
AI-generated articles use a generic tone. In other words, they lack a voice. AI-generated articles simply state a list of facts and not much more. They tend to be missing things like conversational hooks, calls to action, and other ways to engage the reader. If you are looking to write a post that is in line with your writing style, brand, or voice, you will have to do a lot of rewriting to get the desired tone.
AI-generated articles may lack originality and even plagiarize. When you give it a prompt, it responds with information it has learned from other sources. Because of this, it’s not enough to simply take that information and present it as is. It’s unlike doing research where you are sifting through the information yourself and providing your analysis on top of it. In addition to that, if you are thinking of using AI tools to automate your blog without doing any manual work, people are already doing that so you will be no different.
The information may be inaccurate. Most of the information the AI tool contains might be accurate, but some of it could also be wrong. It is important to verify this information before publishing as there will be consequences for providing false information. More will be discussed in one of the sections below.
In general, it is not sufficient, and even be potentially problematic if you generate and publish these articles without proofreading them.
Can AI Tools help you create an outline and generate ideas?
While I don’t recommend using AI for generating articles, you could generate an outline instead. That way, you can save time and know what to research in advance. Using AI to generate outlines speeds up the process while allowing you to add your own ideas, striking a great balance between improving productivity and ensuring good writing.
Can AI Tools give accurate and relevant information?
For the most part, AI tools have been able to accurately answer my questions. It should be noted, however, that the data it has may have limitations. The latest data that ChatGPT has been trained on at this time, for example, is from 2021. While that’s fine if you have any questions that can be answered with information from or before that year, it won’t be able to answer any questions that require recent information.
An example of this was when I asked ChatGPT how many times Argentina has won the World Cup. With the data it has, it answered that the country has won the World Cup two times. It does, however, state that the latest knowledge update was in September 2021 and suggests that you verify the information with other sources. When you search for the answer on Google, the results show that Argentina has won the World Cup three times, with the country’s most recent win in 2022.
Even if you think the AI tool can answer a question, with the information it currently has, it’s always a good idea to verify its answer anyway. Here’s another interaction I had when I asked ChatGPT how many countries start with the letter “V”.
As you can see here, ChatGPT says three countries start with the letter, “V”. However, there is a fourth country called Vietnam. Someone may say it did not include Vietnam because the country’s official name is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. With that logic though, ChatGPT would answer that only one country starts with the letter, “V”, which would be Vatican City. The official names of the other two countries are the Republic of Vanuatu and the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.
In general, AI tools might be good at answering prompts but their responses will require verification to ensure they are accurate.
Can you solely rely on AI Tools for blogging?
While AI can help, it can be seen above that you should not just use AI for blogging. It’s not guaranteed that you can produce high-quality articles with just AI and you are prone to facing problems by doing so. So far, I’ve mainly talked about using AI tools for writing, but how about automating other tasks such as generating images? Even those tools aren’t perfect yet, and you are better off using your own images or getting them from somewhere else.
At best, it can be used to complement your toolset when blogging, but AI tools have yet to produce consistently perfect results.
Does Google care if you use AI tools for creating content?
There have been claims that Google cares if the content is AI-generated and will punish that content. These claims are false and Google has disputed that themselves. They acknowledge that automation can aid the content creation process and that automation has been used for a long time. With that, they will continue to evaluate the quality of content as usual. Google will reward high-quality content that demonstrates E-E-A-T (Expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and punishes low-quality content regardless of whether it is AI-generated or not.
Therefore, you are safe to use AI tools if they help you with the content creation process as long as the content you produce is original, helpful, and people-first.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article isn’t to take a position for or against AI tools. Instead, I argue that AI tools can help with the blogging process, but only if you use them responsibly. While AI alone cannot create a great blog post, it can certainly be a tool for improving productivity. AI can do some of the heavy lifting for you, but it is up to you to use it in the most optimal way possible.
Moving forward, if you are interested in using AI tools, look around and see what’s available. Try them out and determine if they are useful for you. If used responsibly, you may potentially see benefits and if not, you can continue blogging with the same methods you used before.