Keeping the Humanity at the Forefront of AI and Content Creation
If you’ve hung around our channels for any period of time, you’ve possibly read Greg’s early musings on Hodges’ AI stance, listened to our chat with Ashley Brooks from Roth Jackson about IP and ownership of AI-generated content or saw Jon’s LinkedIn post about AI in public relations. In a world of industries that could be supported by AI, the work we do with content creation, blog writing and copywriting arguably is the most susceptible to the impacts of large language models, which have the sole job of regurgitating language outputs.
We take great pride in the content creation and copywriting our teams produce, because while efficiencies are important, so is creating authentic, valuable and rich content. For many of our clients, our content creation strategies are less about volume and more about impact because keeping humanity at the forefront is important to us (and we’d argue, your audience, too). Here are a couple of ways we’re keeping authentic and human-centric content in our content marketing work.
Content Featuring Your People
AI is great at generalized content. If you want a wet blanket of a blog post that has no heart and soul, ask ChatGPT to write it. But, if you’re looking for blog or social media writing that have life and authenticity, you need someone to extract and create that content. As far as I know, AI can’t interview a mother on her lunch break to create a piece of content that became a top performer in a campaign. It also can’t capitalize on industry events to capture voices for months’ worth of content. When you’re selling a product or service, people need to see themselves in your marketing, not a generalized persona version of themselves.
Thought Leadership Content
We talk about thought leadership content a lot at Hodges. It can be dangerously close to an overly used buzzword, but in today’s content landscape, it’s more important than ever.
Inherently, developing thought leadership content requires you to have a unique perspective on your industry, products and services. It’s putting your voice out front, and if you’re playing the algorithms, through video content. Similar to our previous point, a summation of what the industry is talking about isn’t a unique perspective. This content strategy requires a strong point of view, and the content that comes from this can authentically fuel your content marketing efforts.
Case Studies
Again, a fundamental component of case studies is unique results that showcase success and demonstrate your expertise. Chat and Claude can’t manifest projects and results (well, they probably can, but hallucinations are a whole other topic). When we’re selling our capabilities, we’re not just selling strategies and tactics, we’re selling the relationships and the people who help organizations realize their PR and marketing goals. It’s not enough to say you can do a particular service, you need to show how it’s done and how your approach is different – and works.
Ethical Content Creation
If you’re looking for pure content outputs, ChatGPT and Claude could be your friends. If you’re generating content purely for the sake of filling the void and playing to the AI-run search algorithms, have at it. But like other innovations in the past, there is a case to be made in investing in quality, authentic and honestly, ethically produced content.
I sat down and poured my brain power and energy into creating this post without asking an AI tool to help me outline or come up with transition sentences. I spent approximately 38 minutes writing it using only keywords provided by our friends at Addison Clark and my own hot take on the topic. I can say with 100% certainty that these words are mine, not plucked and pieced together from a variety of sources that were fed into a tool trained to push content back out.
And that guarantee is worth investing in.
Casey Prentice
A self-proclaimed organizational junkie and data geek who confesses to a secret desire to be a professional organizer, Casey enjoys account management, writing, editing and digital content strategy. Her agency work has helped clients like Virginia’s Community Colleges, VCU, ODU and Virginia DMV.
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