Technology development has brought a lot of changes in various sectors, including the writing and reading industry. With the introduction of AI, businesses are able to accomplish writing-related tasks easily; hence, the writer’s jobs are impacted severely.
Many AI tools have been developed recently that can perform all the tasks of writers with speed and accuracy. By using AI tools, well-structured content can be generated in minutes with few prompts.
But is AI reliable? Can AI replace human writers entirely?
These questions have been revolving around the industry and are now highly debated topics.
In this article, I will shed some light on the ongoing topic of AI Vs. Human Writers. Through this, I will highlight the need to bring balance between these two for the smooth functioning of the businesses.
What is AI Writing?
When you use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create written content, it is called AI writing. It can generate content in a few minutes with accuracy. By simply entering a prompt, you can command the AI writing software to write essays or short stories, edit your content, and more.
AI is creating chaos within the industry by challenging the traditional methods of writing. It has transformed the writing industry and is used for various purposes. Writers are highly affected by the change and are against the use of AI for writing-related tasks.
The efficient and fast delivery of AI writing tools is leading businesses to choose AI over human writing. Organizations are using AI tools for content creation, proofreading, email writing, and more, and this is resulting in the elimination of human writers.
AI tools might have several advantages, but you cannot totally rely on them. They generate data-driven content but fail to include creativity and produce human-like content. This is why human writers are essential and should not be eliminated. They bring value to the content.
Combining AI and human writing is the best way to create unique, creative, and reliable content. Let’s explore the benefits and disadvantages of AI and Human writing!
Benefits and Drawbacks of AI and Human Writing
Before diving into the impact of AI tools, let’s know the benefits and drawbacks of AI and Human writing. Exploring the positives and negatives helps in further understanding various aspects.
Benefits of AI
- Saves Time and Money: AI tools save a lot of time. They can generate website copy or long-form content within minutes. The compensation you need to provide to human writers is more than the subscription required for AI tools. So, both money and time are saved by using AI tools.
- SEO: A few AI writing tools can write SEO copy if needed for businesses to reach the desired target audience. So, if anyone does not want to learn SEO, they can use AI tools to incorporate SEO into their content marketing strategy.
- Location-specific language: For businesses serving multiple countries, AI tools can write location-specific language to make the content more relatable.
- Idea Generation: AI tools can also be used to generate ideas for your blog posts. When you cannot think of any topics for your website, AI tools can provide a plethora of ideas.
- Editing and Proofreading: Editing and proofreading can also be performed using AI tools. It makes the editing process faster.
Drawbacks of AI
- Errors: Though the technology has upgraded, AI tools still make mistakes here and there. Errors like punctuation, grammar, data, etc., must be checked before releasing them to public websites or sending them to clients.
- Lacks Human Touch: AI writing tools lack human touch in their content. They do what they are trained to do but, unfortunately, cannot include human emotions and creativity in the write-ups, which are essential parts of the content.
- Biased: AI tools work on algorithms and templates and are created by human beings; hence, it’s unlikely for them to be completely bias-free. They may contain unintended bias in the outputs.
- Plagiarism and quality issues: There is a high possibility of plagiarised or paraphrased content being delivered by the AI tools. Apart from this, the quality of the content might be compromised because the tools scrape the internet for examples.
- Human assistance: AI tools need human assistance as they can have errors in the output. A review is necessary for ensuring the reliability, accuracy, and clarity of the content.
Benefits of Human Writing
- Creativity: Humans have creative thinking abilities that help to generate creative content. AI tools lack creativity, but human writers can create new ideas to build something innovative.
- Originality: Humans have the ability to produce content that is original. They can incorporate real-life experiences in a unique way to bring out the originality in the context.
- Empathy and connection: Human writers can evoke deep feelings within the readers and make them feel a plethora of emotions through their writing. The power of profound feelings and memories included by human writers produces valuable content.
- Flexibility: Frequent changes in the content are common, and human writing provides the flexibility and freedom to alter style, tone, and format anytime and anywhere.
- Quality: Quality of the content is essential, and human writers maintain the quality with proper precision. Delivering high-quality content that connects with the audience is the priority of many businesses and is possible through human writing.
Drawbacks of Human Writing
- Time-Consuming: AI can generate content in minutes, whereas human writers take time to create content because of manual work such as research, writing, editing, etc. Human writers can also get overwhelmed with large amounts of data and work.
- Biases: Humans have their personal opinions, and this can result in delivering biased content. The impartiality may impact the objectivity of the content.
- Inconsistency: Inconsistency is common when it comes to human writing. The writing styles and tones may vary depending on different writers, which leads to inconsistencies.
- Mistakes: The content may have errors despite multiple human edits and reviews. The human eye can sometimes skip a few mistakes.
How is AI Impacting Human Writing?
The rise of AI is threatening the job markets as AI tools can perform a lot of tasks easily with speed and accuracy, for which humans need time. Whether it be writing, management, or any other industry, AI has the potential to take over the jobs.
If I specifically talk about writers, many are extremely threatened by the introduction of AI. Tools like ChatGPT and more can deliver desired content with few mere prompts.
AI tools have the capability to write short blogs, long-form content, screenplays, copywriting, email writing, educational content, and more. Businesses are attracted to these tools because of their fast delivery and accuracy.
AI is impacting human writing in numerous ways. The use of AI was also one of the reasons for the recent Hollywood writer’s strike. However, writers must understand AI lacks a few essential skills that only human writers can provide.
AI tools provide straightforward and plain content without inducing creativity and human touch. The involvement of emotions and empathy makes the content engaging and relatable for the readers, and this can only be done by human writers.
Apart from this, creative problem-solving or critical thinking are a few other things that AI cannot decipher and incorporate yet. Although the deliverables of AI are considered accurate, they still need human editing and review because of the tendency of errors.
So, yes, AI is definitely impacting the writing industry, but it cannot remove the human writers altogether.
Balance Between AI and Human Writing
As you learned how AI is affecting human writing, let’s understand how these two can be balanced. Using AI without human intervention can be risky, so AI writing still needs human writers to complete the tasks. On the other hand, human writers can enhance and speed up their work with the use of AI tools.
So, rather than feeling threatened by artificial intelligence, it’s necessary to accept the changing era and learn to use the tools for skill development. AI is there to support humans to make their work easier, not to totally replace them.
The world will always need human writers and their creativity, no matter what!
Verdict
AI is affecting several industries, and the job market is seeing changes because of artificial intelligence.
I hope this article was helpful for you in understanding the impact of AI on the writing industry and how writers are stressed about the involvement of the tools.
But in the end, it’s explained that AI tools are for making the tasks simple for human writers, to speed up the process, and not to replace them from the industry.
What are your thoughts regarding the impact of AI on human writing?