Artificial intelligence and deep learning are areas that are seeing some pretty significant advances at the moment, particularly when it comes to natural language processing (NLP). Technology like GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), which is available to the public, can offer some impressive results when it comes to creating readable text when trained on a suitable library, and future versions of the software that aren’t yet publicly available have been demonstrated to yield almost spooky outputs.

With content basically an essential for any business looking to incorporate an SEO strategy into their marketing, will this technology ever be able to fully replace the need for human content writers? Equally, will it ever be able to replace writers in other areas, such as in creating advertising copy, reporting the news, or even writing fiction?

Simple Content May be Done by AI in the Not-too-Distant Future

In reality, there are some businesses who have tried using computer generated content in the past, though without technology like GPT-3 to help them. When SEO was a newer concern and less well understood by businesses, the practice of doing automated ‘spins’ of articles was one a lot of people adopted, allowing them to get many supposedly unique articles from just one piece of copy written by a human. However, this didn’t really prove successful, as unless someone writes a custom spin program for the articles in question, which takes quite a lot of skill and would generally end up more expensive than just getting content writers to write multiple articles for you, spun articles generally come out in a way that isn’t readable to humans, and gives a bad impression of your business.

Tech like GPT-3 would have similar issues on all but the simplest of content, but on very basic content that is created more for SEO than for humans to read, it could potentially be used with far better results than spinning. However, for things that require research, product knowledge, or even just advanced implementation of keyword strategies, content writers are likely to be needed for a long time to come.

Human Input Will Still be Required

Even when AI does have the capabilities to create basic content, human input will still be required. This will be for things like editing and ensuring the text output by the AI doesn’t contain things like falsehoods or misinformation – we are a long way off having AI that can fact check the things it writes while it’s writing them.

SEO Strategies

While it could be possible to generate simple articles that are human readable in the near future, the way these AIs currently work doesn’t allow the user much flexibility when it comes to what ends up in the text. Software can no doubt be created that will allow for this, but at present it wouldn’t be possible to get your text to also incorporate your keywords, links and other SEO driven features. Again, this would need to be done by a human for now, but it will be interesting to see how developers look to incorporate these features should an AI based content writing solution be in the offing.

For now, content writers are likely to be just as important to businesses as they have been for the past decade. Even as AI begins to offer new possibilities for content creation, there will still be a need for editing, project management, keyword analysis, and other services that support content writing.