“AI is going to put writers out of work!”

In case you missed it, the Chicago Sun-Times published a book roundup of almost completely made-up titles in a summer book supplement. The authors were real, but most of the books were fake.

Turns out the freelancer used AI and didn't bother to check what it spit out. This to me is egregious. I understand that many people use AI for research, but it is notorious for hallucinating and making stuff up. As an example, I asked it to write a short bio of me, giving it my LinkedIn profile and my website. It still made stuff up—multiple times.

So it worries me that so many people are taking what AI says as gospel. Especially writers, who should know better.

In B2B content marketing for the kind of complex topics I write about (healthcare, healthtech, SaaS, higher education), getting things right is important. Not just as an ethical concern, but because you need to respect your customers and potential customers. And if they find out or even suspect that what you're saying is wrong or isn't true? Game over.

I can't count the amount of times I have chased down a statistic only to come to a dead end, find out it is totally outdated, or the context makes it useless.

I think AI has its uses in writing. I use it to get my head around a new topic or to get ideas for short copy like headlines and email subject lines.

But here's the key: I'm curating what it comes up with. I don't take it at face value. I look at the sources it uses. I tweak the content to fit my clients' brand voice and tone.

So if you’re a business letting AI go wild with your content with no or minimal oversight, that's probably not a smart strategy. You might not see the negative impact right away. I've been hearing from other writers about clients coming back, hat in hand, because outsourcing everything to AI either wasn't as efficient as they thought it would be because it took more time to edit everything or it just wasn't bringing in the engagement they got with human-powered content.

AI can be a time-saver. But sometimes those savings aren't worth the cost.