AI in Content Creation - Fundamentals and Best Practices When Using AI Generation Tools

AI is everywhere these days, but does it live up to the hype? If you’re tired of reading articles that read the same and seem to be out of some kind of formula, you’re not alone. Many businesses are using AI for content creation, taking advantage of its speed and scalability, but the human element can’t be overlooked when using these technologies. 

The real value of AI lies in how well you can combine its efficiency with your team’s creativity. It’s about using AI strategically—not to replace human talent, but to amplify it, helping you produce quality content without sacrificing originality.

Today, I want to share the fundamentals and best practices when using AI generation tools to scale your content creation processes without sounding dull and generic. 

Let’s go!

The Fundamentals of AI Content Creation Tools

First, let’s understand how AI content creation tools work how they can fit within your content marketing strategy, and what role they play in SEO. 

How AI Content Creation Tools Work

AI-powered content creation tools work to analyze huge data sets to "learn" the structure of language and how different types of content are created, from emails to whitepapers. 

Plus, these AI content creation tools are fed and updated constantly to improve at producing human-like text. For this, they employ Natural Language Processing, which allows them to understand context and language to ensure the content they come up with is grammatically correct and contextually relevant.

Types of AI-Generated Content

AI can be used to generate many different types of content. Each type has unique advantages if you match it with your business goals. Some common examples of content you can generate with AI include:

Articles & Blog Posts

You can use AI content creation tools to do research, create an outline, or even create a full first draft, which saves a lot of time in research and structuring. I don’t recommend simply copying and pasting those articles, as AI can be unreliable and “robotic” when creating content. Instead, have your team work on those first drafts to fine-tune them for brand voice and strategies. 

Emails

Whether writing outreach emails or sending offers, AI can structure the content of your emails to suit your audience, helping you increase conversions and engagement in your email marketing campaigns. 

Pillar Pages & Sales Pages

For cornerstone content like pillar pages, AI helps by generating an initial structure. It can provide outlines and basic text for your team to build upon. For example, AI content tools can create headings help you with the clusters your pillar page should relate to and then your team can enhance it with specific details.

Social Media Content & Product Descriptions

AI is ideal for short-form content like social media posts and product descriptions. It quickly generates on-brand captions and concise product descriptions that focus on key features and benefits. For example, AI might produce a product description for a new eco-friendly gadget, highlighting its sustainability and performance in just a few sentences.

Popular AI Content Tools

Of late, a number of these AI content generation platforms have picked immense popularity because of their efficiency and usability. These include:

- OpenAI GPT Models: ChatGPT is one of the most well-known and powerful AI language models. It generates very readable, human-like text and is very easy to use. It also has integration options with GPT library management tools such as AIPRRM (you can find out more on our Learn AI for SEO program)

- Jasper: This is yet another versatile tool that is specifically targetted to content marketing. It includes more advanced features that can take some time to learn compared to ChatGPT. 

- Copy.ai is great for producing marketing copy in very little time; it is very useful for a business that needs to produce a lot of content.

- Claude: Developed by Anthropic, Claude is another AI content generation tool, offering a more “conversation-focused”. While Claude can generate content like GPT, it tends to prioritize ethical considerations and safety, which can make it better suited for businesses concerned about AI biases or misinformation.

Best Practices in Applying AI Content Generation Tools

While AI can significantly improve your content creation process, you should be careful to approach it with a strategy. AI content creation tools should enhance and not replace human creativity and editorial judgment if you’d like to get good results.

1. Set Concrete Goals for AI-Generated Content

Before getting started with AI content generation, you'll need to set some clear objectives for the content. What is it that you are trying to achieve? You also need to be very clear of its strengths, and its weaknesses. 

Whether this be to support your SEO initiatives, drive conversions, or simply sustain a regular output of content, it pays off to have clear goals to feed your tool before generating the content. Your objectives should be defined properly, and your team should understand how AI fits into the content strategy.

If your goal is to improve SEO, you might use AI tools to generate blog posts around specific search terms. Alternatively, if your objective is to drive conversions, you could use AI to draft persuasive product descriptions or email campaigns that focus on highlighting key benefits and calls-to-action.

2. Combine AI with Human Creativity

It's the human touch that makes even the most basic AI-generated content shine. Put differently, while AI may excel in drafting the basics of a blog post, only human writers and editors will match your brand voice, add personal anecdotes, and make your content resonate with the audience it's supposed to reach. 

3. Proofread and Edit AI-generated Content

While AI content creation tools can make content highly readable, they are not foolproof. In fact, ChatGPT itself recommends checking important info, as the software can make mistakes.

Human reviewing of your content will ensure its accuracy, coherence, and branding. It will also allow your team to correct language that sounds awkward or factual inaccuracies AI content creation tools missed. 

It's worth noting that AI content detection tools and their associated "AI scores" are not always reliable indicators of AI-generated content. These detection tools can produce false positives, flagging human-written content as AI-generated or false negatives. 

For example, these tools can detect the US constitution as 100% AI generated: 

The accuracy of these tools can vary widely depending on the AI model used, the content type, and how much the content has been edited. So, while AI detection scores can be a helpful reference, they shouldn't be the sole determinant of content quality or originality (though I recommend the AI score to be below 15%). The focus should remain on ensuring the content is valuable, accurate, and aligned with your brand voice, regardless of how it was initially drafted.

4. Avoid Ethical Issues in AI-powered Content Generation

Let’s address the elephant in the room and talk about ethics and copyright when producing content with AI. These models are only as good as the data they are trained on, which means there is always a risk of perpetuating misinformation or producing biased content. Plus, if you only copy and paste what AI produces, is the content truly yours? 

To avoid these ethical issues, make sure you: 

- Are vigilant, ensuring your AI-generated content is accurate, inclusive, and stands for the values of your brand. Also, be transparent with your audience in cases where some sort of AI tools is the only producer of content.

- Avoid Misinformation by fact-checking any information provided by AI content creation tools. Considering that these platforms sometimes give you information that sounds true but it’s not, so don’t do away with human evaluation.

- Ensure Diversity and Inclusion: Be aware of bias in training materials and make content representative of a diversity of voices and experiences.

- Have Supervision Teams: Have your team review all AI content on a regular basis for adherence to ethical and quality standards. Provide guidelines and internal processes that detail how AI material is going to be vetted before being posted.

5. Collaborate with Your Team on AI Prompts

AI content generation tools respond well to well-written prompts. These should be developed in collaboration with your team, taking into account your goals for the content, your story, and your brand voice. Encourage collaboration between teams to ensure any prompts you give an AI tool are clear and effective. 

Benefits and Limitations of AI Content Generation Tools

We have outlined how AI content creation tools can help you scale your content production, but they do have their limitations. Knowing both sides can help better integrate AI into your content strategy.

Key Benefits of AI Content Generation

- Speed and Efficiency: AI-powered content creation tools cut man-hours drastically. What would take a human days to draft can be done by AI in a few minutes, which means even a small business can keep with regular content in a variety of channels.

- Scaled Research: AI can process an immense amount of information at incredibly high speed, and for that reason, it can be so helpful in preparatory stages when content creation requires a lot of research and data gathering.

- Scalability for Large Content Demands: AI content tools a small business to scale up their content efforts without necessarily increasing the costs. You will be able to create more content while freeing your team for more strategic and creative input.

The Limitations of AI Content Generation

As much as AI can give you coherent and structured content, it usually fails in the more subtle aspects of brand voice, tone and depth of emotion. The content is either dry or too formal and lacks a personal touch, which can lower your audience engagement.

Generic Content Risk

AI works with patterns, so it typically produces generic content that sounds like a formula. If you are not careful with edits and adapting the content to your voice, AI-generated content will look exactly alike your competition’s and will probably fail to communicate to your targeted audience.

Quality Inputs Dependence

Finally, AI are completely dependent on the quality of the input data they have been trained on and the type of prompts they receive. If you don’t know what type of prompts are effective or how to use them, then you’ll probably get inaccurate or irrelevant content - a waste of time. 

Ready to Get Started with AI Content Creation?

AI is revolutionizing content creation, providing businesses—especially smaller ones—the opportunity to scale their content marketing efforts in ways that seemed impossible. 

However, AI is not a silver bullet. While it offers significant advantages in terms of speed and scalability, it cannot fully replace the creativity, empathy, and intuition of human writers. The future (and the present!) of content creation will likely involve a hybrid approach, where AI takes care of the heavy lifting, and humans focus on refining and personalizing the content.

With a thoughtful, strategic approach, AI can be the key to unlocking new levels of efficiency and creativity in your content marketing.

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If you'd like to learn more, check out my YouTube Video about "The Importance Of Supervision Models In AI Adoption For SEO":