I know from the responses to my newsletters about AI that a lot of you don’t use it and don’t want to use it for your content marketing work. And I get that. I was hesitant in the earlier days, too. And I was pretty irritated at a company mandate that required us to use AI.
These days, though, I am continuously more and more impressed with the efficiencies AI gets us. And how it forces us to rethink our processes.
Humans are always in the loop in these new processes. They refine and copyedit every single asset we produce.
But more than that, humans are in the lead with AI content production. We vibe code our own tools on top of platforms like Claude. We build skill management, and skill hierarchy. We grade content against its alignment to our skills and factual accuracy and even PII.
We have version control on all of it. We set time aside each week to review our skills deeply, and to edit and refine them, too. We are learning deeply what AI is very good at, and what we just can’t seem to get it to do well (interlinks, for one).
We’re recognizing our own limits, too. Editing a lot of AI content sometimes causes you to glaze over, and next thing you know you’re reading a sentence about how a filing cabinet and a marketing team member have inherent differences, and just agreeing as though that’s a normal way to explain something.
Nonetheless, our AI content is getting better and better, and still, it needs a human to enhance it before it goes to a final edit. And that’s because AI just can’t do these things well:
- Adding interlinks (lots of hallucinations)
- Linking to relevant research (lots of hallucinations)
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Summarizing case studies (the summarized story is often just plain wrong. Lots of nuance missed).
- Editing out obvious AI sounding stuff (No matter how many writing rules we have in place to do this at creation)
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Addressing critical sentence level edit (i.e. just because it sounds good, does it make actual sense? Because often, the answer is no…)
More and more, it is increasingly clear to me that AI really is a tool, not a replacement. Humans have to teach it, manage it, guide it, correct it, and so much more. Sure, eventually AI will learn on its own, but even then…what will it be learning from?
Documentation is critical. Clear prompts matter. How you string together skills to automate is a true art. I suppose you can call this content engineering, but content folks aren’t engineers. Writers and editors are people who understand the nuances of story, of how to communicate well, and we are all having to learn how to teach that to a machine to replicate it.
My team is getting better and better at that, and learning new things about ourselves and how we work, too.
Human in the lead with AI seems to be the future, to me, not just human in the loop. Because no tool works well without its user, guiding it to do the task at hand in the best way possible.
