Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around us for a while now. Whether we are using Google Translate to understand a language we don’t understand or listening to an audiobook. At a personal level, I can’t deny that AI makes my life easier through the apps on my phone and other gadgets I use on a daily basis. However, there’s one thing that makes me a bit worried. Since the arrival of AI tools like Chat-GPT and others, the biggest downfall (according to me as a content creator), is that people have lost their unique styles and I miss reading original content.
Content creation before AI
As a millennial (circa 1981 to 1996), I’ve had the chance to create my own content without the help of AI, and even won competitions. For sure, my productions – whether written or video were not without mistakes, but one thing that I liked is that I was telling the story while being myself. When someone read it, they could sense that it was me. Each person has a style and this is what makes them who they are. In both my personal and professional lives, I have come across people who have inspired me. But today, when I open my LinkedIn page or Facebook, I see these same people posting AI-generated responses without any edits or personalisation, it makes me wonder about what went wrong? I can’t recognise people and brands anymore. Most of them are writing and publishing in the same style, which I find mechanical and impersonal. As a result, I don’t feel like reading what people are publishing anymore.
Where is it going wrong?
I want to make it clear; I’m not advocating for zero AI in content creation, but we should know how it works and how to use it to help or assist us, without them erasing our identity completely. To understand how AI tools for writing work, we have to use them, test them to understand what makes each one of them specific about something. We have to ask ourselves the following: What are their strengths and weaknesses? Do I really need them or I can do without? I firmly believe that we should be able to drive our activities without being disrupted in case a site is down or a tool is not working. For me, AI is here to make our lives easier, not to replace us. Or to speak on our behalf.
Some patterns
Some of the patterns that I have observed with AI-generated content are the following:
- Use of double emojis in the title
- Some common emojis: 🌟🌍🚀
- Long texts
- Same style (e.g Dive into the world of…)
Below is a text I came across on LinkedIn and when I added the text to an AI content detector, it indicated that it’s 100% from AI. These posts make me realise that I have very low interest in reading content with “no soul,” if I can put it that way.
Keeping our identities
Only time will tell what’s coming in the next months and years regarding AI, but for me, I prefer reading something with slight mistakes and typos, rather than reading something that has no mistakes but has no personality. Let’s not lose ourselves in the flood of AI-generated content and limit them to areas where they act as a support, but do not replace us. Since AI seems to be here to stay, perhaps a solution is to acknowledge its presence and focus on training ourselves on how to make good use of it. What do you think?