The "AI" traits of good copy existed long before the advent of Artificial Intelligence

Especially over the last 15 months since ChatGPT and other Generative AI tools have become available for public use, many have predicted that they will ring the death-knell for content writers. Such doomsday prognostications have also been made about many other professions.

It is true that AI in general, and Generative AI in particular, is transforming how many businesses work. The process of writing content for marketing purposes too is changing. Clients use Gen AI tools to create drafts that they then pass on to their writers to work on. Many writers too find it convenient to use Generative AI to spit out drafts that they then refine. After all, why bother to read through several articles when Gen AI can give you a handy summary? Read on to find six reasons that may change your mind, whether you are a client or writer.

As a content writer and communications trainer/coach, I firmly believe that good content- especially the kind used for Marketing/Sales- has always had several “AI” attributes. The “AI” I refer to has nothing to with Artificial Intelligence. However, these traits, which are critical for content to achieve their objectives, are not always appreciated by clients or applied in practice by writers. I hope this post, which explicitly calls these traits out, will help both writers of marketing content and their clients.

• Arouse Interest in readers to go beyond the first couple of lines or merely skim through the article.
• Provide Accurate Information so that the content asset builds trust with readers, encouraging them to seek out more of your content.
• Articulate Insights that readers may not know or have thought of. This boosts your credibility as an expert or thought leader. It also creates a “wow factor” for your content.
• Actively Influence the way readers look at your business/solution offerings in ways that make your positioning and differentiation stand out as the most relevant.
• Always Inspire action. Good marketing content must have explicit and tacit calls to action that persuade decision-makers and influencers in your target audience to take the next step. Only such content will truly help your business generate valuable leads and steadily push prospects further into the sales funnel.
• Align Interests of the many individuals who constitute your “target audience”, which is in fact, not homogeneous from a content consumption and impact perspective. Readers carry their own points of view, priorities, prejudices and pet peeves. For most of us, the default reaction is to disagree with what appears to go against our paradigms, mental models or zones of comfort.At least at this time, Generative AI tools are essentially sophisticated content aggregators and synthesizers. They largely extract information fed to them during the training of their underlying language models, and regurgitate it. While Generative AI produces grammatically correct, plausible content, it has many pitfalls (including hallucination, IPR violation etc.). The above-mentioned “AI” traits may not always be infused into the output. That is something experienced human writers are better at because it requires empathy- something that AI may take many more years to develop.