I challenge the AI to the ultimate writing contest. Oh boy, well, a couple of problems here. This is not good. The challenge was to write a fragment of a blog post about productivity following the best content writing and SEO practices. We’ll start by finding out who will come up with better ideas for titles. Then, I’ll challenge AI to write our comprehensive outline for the article. Finally, both AI and I will write one intro, one main paragraph, and one outro. Our extremely sophisticated judge panel of top industry professionals will then assess the quality of the AI content and my content and decide once and for all if AI is able to replace it. Let’s do it.
If you ever wrote even one piece of long-form content, you probably know that a good title can improve the performance of your blog post massively. Good titles spark curiosity and make clicking the ‘read more’ button irresistible. But does AI know that too? The topic of our blog post is productivity for content creators. The way I approach coming up with eye-catching titles for my blog post is by identifying a goal, a struggle, or a desired outcome of my reader. This ensures that the reader can immediately relate to the headline, and that is a great starting point to get them to click and start reading. For example, a title like ‘Three Ways to Maintain Focus While Writing Long-Form Content’ discusses a specific goal my target reader has: maintaining focus. So if somebody reads this title, they will know exactly if this text is right or wrong for them. Also, at the beginning of the blog post, I used a number, and numbers are great at catching our attention. Now let’s see what ChatGPT will come up with.
[AI-generated content]
Foreign short and ambiguous prompt. We got exactly that, a very ambiguous and kind of boring title. So let’s cut the bottom slack and give it more information first. To do it, I asked AI about the common struggles, goals, or desired outcomes of content creators that are related to productivity. Once it came up with a few ideas, I asked it to use one of them to write the title. Unfortunately, again, the titles are super ambiguous and really weird. AI follows this weird pattern of starting with a metaphorical pre-title and then goes on to write the actual title. But even the actual title is still super general and doesn’t give the reader information about what the text will actually discuss, probably because AI doesn’t know it yet and I do. So I guess that’s a point for me.
And right away, we’ve got a problem. One of the most important parts about outlining your content is competitive analysis. This means analyzing your competitors’ articles and looking for ways to write something better than them. ChatGPT can’t help me do it because it doesn’t browse the web in real time. Regardless, I want to see how smart ChatGPT is and compare my outline to the one AI wrote.
[AI-generated outline]
This looks not bad. AI managed to organize their content logically, provided three distinctive pieces of advice, and even included a space for additional resources. However, the outline still lacks specificity. For example, within the first section, it mentioned tips for creating a quiet workspace without giving me any examples of such tips. As a writer, I would need to clarify them myself and see how my choices will influence the rest of the text. So there is still much more human effort to make here. Now let’s look at my outline.
[My outline]
As you can see, not only is it much more detailed, but it also provides the writer with some additional important information. This outline will organize my work on the text, remove the need to conduct tons of supplementary research, and allow me to focus on my writing instead of going back and forth between Google and my draft. Nonetheless, I am not throwing the entire outline away and will use the section about the additional resources in my text as well. So let’s give AI half a point to acknowledge the efforts and let’s move on to the next section.
There are a couple of frameworks you can use to write a killer intro for your blog post. But for this competition, I decided to use one of my favorites: PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution). It’s excellent at building the connection with the reader right from the very first few sentences because it discusses their specific struggles and challenges, spices it up with drama, and promises to show a better way to do things. I asked ChatGPT if it knows the framework, and it does. Now let’s see how ChatGPT will apply it to write an intro for a blog post.
[AI-generated intro]
Thank you. Oh boy, there are a couple of problems here. First of all, I see a phrase that ChatGPT adores for some reason: ‘in the bustling realm of content creation’. If you ask AI to write you any long-form content, 99% of the time it will use this phrase, and there would be nothing wrong with this if it wasn’t so freaking fluffy. It gives nothing to the reader. If I removed it, the text later on would feel complete. Nonetheless, speaking of the rest of the text, it requires major tweaks. First, let’s simplify the language. The language and phrasing AI uses are confusing at times. Also, you may notice that AI gave a couple of tips but didn’t provide any examples of their implementation. This will most likely leave the reader asking themselves what the author actually meant when writing ‘personalize your space’ or ‘choose a quiet location’. So here is my reading compared to the AI writing side by side. I don’t want to sound cocky, but I guess we know who gets a point this time.
Outros are a great way to inspire readers to take action, reflect on the matter you presented to them, or just leave them happy that they read the entire thing. To achieve this, you need to connect the dots between the most important points you’ve made in your text and wrap it up in clear takeaways. Let’s see what AI has to say about it.
[AI-generated outro]
Well, I’m pleasantly surprised, sort of. Despite the hideous fluffy language, AI basically attempted to do the same thing as I did. It highlighted all the main themes from before and encouraged the reader to explore different options. For that reason, I’ll give AI a point this time. So let’s review the AI’s work. While completing this challenge, I spotted a few good ideas that I came up with. It actually felt nice to have a second brain that helped me make my own text more insightful. But that’s it. I really didn’t like the language AI uses to deliver information. Seemed like AI used tons of difficult vocabulary just for the sake of it. But even more importantly, AI doesn’t deliver clear actionable advice. It slides through the solution to the problem without showing you why you should implement it or how to do it. And because of that, I feel like AI will do an awful job if you try to rely your entire content production on it. While the language style or tone can be easily fixed with a better prompt, AI lacks a very important ingredient that builds trust with your readers and makes them book a call with you, start a free trial, or just buy something from you. Your expertise, only you can offer your audience insights that build connections with them. The only thing AI can do for you is to create a regurgitated version of something that’s already out there. The question is, does your audience deserve something original or only photocopied? Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, make sure to leave it a thumbs up and subscribe to this channel to receive fresh content tips every Monday. Love you, bye.
