AI May Be Helpful, but It’s No Substitute for the Human Touch

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to help people worldwide write content for their blogs, websites, magazine articles, and so on. By providing a few key words to an AI script, writers can quickly develop a strategy to organize their thoughts, create an outline for their work, and even produce substantial written output. However, there are some fundamental issues and considerations to be aware of when using AI alone, without having a human to review and edit your work.

AI Issue #1: Plagiarism

To generate output, AI taps into thousands of existing online content sources, such as books, journals, websites, articles, blogs, and social media posts. It can pull content from a wide variety of these sources and incorporate it into your work, using the collective intelligence of the internet to place it in the best way it can understand, based on previous human-driven writing rules and examples. This leaves the author wide open to potential plagiarism violations, unless they thoroughly review and rework the content to ensure it is an original work. A human editor can confirm that your content is original, created by you, and uses your personal or corporate style and voice. 

AI Issue #2: Copyright Protection

If you create your content entirely with AI, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) will not register your work. Items include the written word, images, and artwork. USCO requires that a human hand created the content. If you are using AI-generated material when applying for a copyright, you must disclose this fact in your application and describe the AI content included.

AI Issue #3: Fact-Checking

As already mentioned, AI pulls from many different sources. The content needs verification to prevent disorganization of facts and an inaccurate flow of content. While the concepts from AI can help, the ideas need to be written by a professional writer and reviewed by an editor. We can do both.

The Main Ingredient: The Uniqueness of Being Human

Artificial intelligence cannot understand and properly convey the complex concepts, breadth, and scope of human intelligence, emotion, creativity, or experience. To quote an old catchphrase, AI is “just the facts, ma’am.” A human editor reviews your content and provides meaningful suggestions to validate your work’s most important attributes, such as accuracy, authenticity, depth, and brevity. An editor ensures that your story is original and unfolds in an organic, provocative way.

An editor reviews your work as a whole, correcting any issues and looks for various ways to enhance it, and make sure it is accurate and original. Their first job is to find and fix historical inaccuracies, content holes, and sections where the content does not meet your original intent. Editors help you expand on your ideas by making your content flow seamlessly to make sure your writing has a real and meaningful impact on your audience.

In nonfiction and fiction writing, editors focus on flow and clarity, ensuring your ideas make the right point, and use the correct grammar, style, and context. An editor can apply style guidelines from The Chicago Manual of Style, The Associated Press Stylebook, or your company’s custom style guide. For technology articles and blogs, editors can use The Microsoft Style Guide or the Apple Style Guide to ensure that technical terms and usage are correct.  

Artificial intelligence is a great generator of ideas for the work that you, as the writer, are doing. However, its capabilities fall short and it cannot truly understand or properly convey the most important aspects of the human experience; complex, non-linear ideas; or the creative thinking required to be meaningful and provocative to your audience. In other words, on its own, AI-generated content cannot be a true substitute for the organic human touch.

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