How To Use AI Responsibly In Your Content Writing

If you’re writing content, be it for your business or for a client, then it’s not at all uncommon that you might consider using AI tools to help you along. However, overreliance on these tools can end up shooting you in the foot, making your content look generic and similar to all other AI-generated content, including incorrect information, or getting easily flagged as AI-written rather than generated by human insights. AI tools can be useful; there’s no doubt about that. However, if you’re relying on them without any checks, then it can become a major problem. Here are a few tips on how to use these tools more responsibly.

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Use To Assist, Not Replace

If you want to use tools like ChatGPT to help with your writing, then there’s nothing wrong with that. They can be great tools for brainstorming, for creating content outlines, for providing ideas, and even for helping you refine points. However, they should never be used as the author of your work. Think of AI as your co-pilot. You set the direction, you decide what the purpose of your content is, and you rely on your own insight as much as you can, then let AI help you expand on your ideas and present new avenues to explore.

Fact-Check Everything It Says

AI can be very convincing, and it can produce content with a lot of confidence. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s always right. In fact, it most definitely will not be. If AI presents you with any facts or stats that you’re not aware of, take it with a grain of salt; there’s a decent chance that it was generated out of very little real evidence. You can use AI to provide sources for the points that it brings up, and if the links behind the points it gives check out, there’s nothing wrong with using it as a research tool. However, where it doesn’t provide citations, you should always verify, making sure you can find the source of any stats, quotes, or references before you include them in your work. AI can sometimes get even basic factual statements wrong, and the more niche the subject, the more likely it is to make mistakes.

Give Your Content The Human Factor

If you have read enough AI-generated content, then you will begin to develop a sense for the “AI tone.” It tends to be on the straightforward, even slightly formal, side. You can ask AI to write more informally, to be funny, or to have a different tone, but it’s still likely to feel a little “off.” People, especially clients of creative agencies, are starting to get more sensitive to these tonal differences. As such, avoid letting AI make word choices for you. Maintain your unique voice, and don’t be afraid to go off on tangents related to the points that AI produces.

Don’t Use Raw AI Formatting

Just as AI can often have a few tonal or word choice quirks, it also has its quirks in formatting. The big issue with these quirks, in particular, is that they’re highly recognizable through plagiarism and AI checkers. Unusual quotation marks, non-standard dashes, and invisible characters can make your content look AI-generated, even if you have highly edited or rewritten it. You can either make sure that all of your content is hand-written and formatted naturally, rather than copying and pasting from AI tools, or you can use tools to remove hidden characters and make sure that your content is formatted right before submitting it to your client. Whatever the case, raw AI formatting is going to definitely set off some red flags for anyone using detectors.

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Don’t Use AI To Bulk Up Your Word Count

Whether it’s to meet your client specifications or because you want to reach SEO goals with your content, you might feel a need to meet a certain word count. In order to do this, a lot of people will copy and paste their content into AI tools and ask them to expand the word count. However, when that happens, it tends to produce very fluffy text with a lot of unnecessary language that only serves to dilute the points that you’re trying to make. Instead of asking for simple word count-padding, you can ask AI to help clarify or research certain points, giving you the content that you can then work from to write more.

Consider Citing AI With Your Work

It may not always be necessary or even wise to cite every time that you use AI for your work. If your text is 100% human-written but you use AI to help you research your points (while still independently verifying them), stating that AI helped with your content can make people assume that AI did more of the heavy lifting than it did. However, with academic or professional work, it can sometimes be wise to acknowledge AI use. This is especially true if you’re asked to explicitly disclose AI involvement. More and more institutions and publications are coming around to AI use in assisting with content writing, so this transparency can often help establish your credibility, rather than undermining it.

Don’t Overestimate AI

Perhaps the most important lesson you can learn is that AI is not infallible. It is not a miracle technology that can generate pure, insightful, factual content from nothing. All you have to do is take a look at the many times that AI got it wrong to see that this tool is only as practical as the person wielding it makes it. AI can make mistakes, it can generate content with little value, and it can fall short in providing nuance, evidence, and citations. Be aware of the limitations of AI and that it’s not a true thinking tool, but largely derives its conclusions and content from huge datasets that can easily be misinterpreted.

The more sophisticated AI tools become, the more likely it is that people are going to turn to them for sheer convenience. However, human effort is still one of the biggest predictors of content quality, so ensure that there’s no shortage of that.