How to use AI in Your Content Creation: Do’s and Don’ts

To paraphrase The Simpsons newscaster Kent Brockman, “I, for one, welcome our AI overlords.”

It certainly seems like artificial intelligence has taken over, after all.

Its binary fingers are everywhere:

• Google search results
• Browser extensions
• Apps like ClickUp and Loom
• Blogs and social media

But just because a tool is ubiquitous, it doesn’t mean it should be. The $64,000 question we’re all grappling with is, “Where does it make sense to use AI?”

AI and Shiny-Object Syndrome

As of 2024, we are still mostly in the “shiny object” stage of AI.

If we can make AI do a thing, we figure it must be better at that thing than passé options like, you know, people. (Humans are so 2018.)

But as we learn more, it’s becoming obvious that this approach just isn’t working.

And this is seen perhaps most clearly when it comes to AI-assisted written content.

The $64,000 question we’re all grappling with is, “Where does it make sense to use AI?”

Completely AI-generated blogs have ballooned in recent months. I’ll talk more about why this is a bad idea to grow your business below, but at the heart of the matter is the fact that AI can’t yet—and may never be able to—write compelling, original content.

You know, the kind of content that:

• Addresses readers’ pain points and solves their problems
• Provides new, novel, or unique points of view
• People actually want to read

Instead, AI tends to write content that is:

• Boring
• Derivative
• Factually suspect

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want those words associated with my brand!

But thankfully, not all is lost. AI can still be incredibly useful to help you streamline your content creation process—without sacrificing quality.

3 Ways to Use AI in Your Writing

Here are three ways you can use AI as a positive force in your writing.

Brainstorming

For me, this is where AI shines.

While I might have trouble coming up with 50 blog post ideas, AI has no such issues.

While you might have trouble coming up with 50 blog post ideas, AI doesn’t.

Creating a brainstorming prompt is not difficult, and you can quickly generate as many AI-produced ideas as you want to get your creative juices flowing—in a fraction of the time.

It’s never been easier to go from nothing to something, which is often the biggest obstacle of all.

Summarizing articles and videos

Another area where AI does an admirable (yet admittedly imperfect) job is summarizing long-form content.

Whether it’s a lengthy blog post, article, or even YouTube video, AI can quickly digest the information to spit out summaries and find action items or other bits of value.

AI can quickly digest information to spit out summaries and find action items.

As a content creator, this is great for research because it helps you home in on where to dig deeper and avoid dead-end rabbit trails.

(Seriously, who wants to watch a 10-minute video only to discover the title was clickbait?)

Targeted Google searches

Speaking of homing in, Google’s Gemini, in particular, is great at targeted search queries.

Sometimes you want to get very specific with your search intent—more than a regular browser can handle.

Gemini allows you to be as surgical as you want when searching the internet.

Enter AI.

Gemini allows you to be as surgical as you want:

• You can ask it to limit results to the top five or 10 best websites.
• You can specify you only want results from .gov addresses.
• You can even ask it to summarize each website for you.

When you need more than a basic Google search, AI’s got your back.

AI Saves You Time and Effort

In the end, the best use cases for AI in your content creation process involve saving time and effort during planning phases.

AI can do much of the grunt work for you, whether it’s quickly brainstorming ideas, summarizing web pages, or scanning Google results.

This in turn frees up more of your time for the still-required hard work of actually writing—a task you do not want to hand over to the machines.

Why is that, you ask? Keep reading to find out why AI isn’t a shortcut to success.

3 Ways NOT to Use AI (If You Want Results)

AI is your assistant, not your employee.

This is a key distinction.

You can’t just delegate a task to AI and say, “Let me know if you have any questions.” It doesn’t work that way, and it almost certainly never will.

That’s because, at the end of the day, AI is a tool, not a person.

AI is your assistant, not your employee.

And like any tool, it’s built to do or assist with a certain set of tasks. While AI may be a super-powerful tool, it still can’t do everything.

I’ve already covered some ways to use AI that will help you write better content more quickly.

Of course, that is only a tiny sliver of what AI is capable of when it comes to content creation.

A caveat: can vs should

But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do that thing—and AI isn’t excluded from the truth of this statement.

AI can certainly take over your content creation process, virtually eliminating the time, effort, and cost. But will AI-generated content get you the business results you’re looking for?

Unless you’re an expert prompt engineer, you’re likely to end up with dry, boring, and bland filler.

That’s a highly dubious proposition.

As mentioned above, AI tends not to create the kind of novel and compelling content you need to set yourself apart from the crowd. Unless you’re an expert prompt engineer, you’re much more likely to end up with dry, boring, and bland filler instead.

Filler that doesn’t help you meet your business goals.

That means there are certain tasks that you can do with AI but shouldn’t. Here are three big ones.

Uncritical copying and pasting

AI doesn’t live in a world of facts or reality. AI lives in a world of probabilities.

This is because of how artificial intelligence works.

AI spits out the most likely series of words in the most likely order based on the input you provide and the data it’s been trained on.

AI doesn’t live in a world of facts or reality—it lives in a world of probabilities.

Now this approach can and does lead to some pretty magical results, but you still need to read and fact-check what it gives you because AI literally does not know what “truth” is.

This has led to some pretty funny (and terrifying) results, like suggesting you use superglue on pizza, eat rocks, or jump off a bridge if you’re depressed. (Please don’t do any of these things!)

Whole-cloth content creation

If your goal is to fill a webpage or email with a lot of words without regard for quality, AI is 100 percent the way to go.

On the other hand, if you’d rather have good copy that resonates with your readers and leads them along your customer journey, AI alone won’t get you there.

If your goal is to fill a webpage or email with a lot of words without regard for quality, AI is 100 percent the way to go.

Regardless of what writing tools you might use, you still have to:

• Consider your readers and how to solve their problems.
• Inject your personality into your content.
• Put your best foot forward.

I know of no tool that can do this for you; if you want results from what you write, you have to put your soul into it.

Replacing human writers and editors

Here’s the bottom line: Even with AI, you still need humans at the heart of your content creation process.

Humans know how to speak to other humans in a way computers don’t.

Humans also have experiences and novel ideas that can be shared with other humans; AI doesn’t have either of these.

Humans know how to speak to other humans in a way computers don’t.

Moreover, only humans can do things like:

• Read the room
• Throw in a joke at the right time
• Violate the rules of grammar to make a point
• Understand when something might be confusing to a reader