Will ChatGPT Replace Content Writers?

Short answer: No. 

Long answer: The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was something that filled many content writers with a sense of existential dread. Our social media feeds were filled with stories of students using the AI tool to generate “expert-level” essays and tech bros touting it as the end of humans in content writing. More concerning, there were several news articles about it passing all kinds of professional exams.

For many content writers, the launch of ChatGPT seemed like the death knell for one of the pillar disciplines of search engine optimization as we know it.

However, as the weeks passed, it became more and more obvious that if AI tools were to replace human writers in SEO, ChatGPT and its current incarnations would not be the ones to do it.

This isn’t to say that there is no place for ChatGPT and other AI tools in SEO. Far from it. There are certainly plenty of ways ChatGPT can empower writers and even other SEO professionals. The problem is, as with all innovations, the capabilities of the platform have been oversold and tragically misrepresented.

Don’t get us wrong. The fact that your grandparents can probably use ChatGPT by themselves is already a massive leap forward for democratized AI. But much like previously overhyped technologies like robot vacuums and self-driving cars, ChatGPT and competing AI technologies are better seen as tools to enhance human capabilities rather than complete replacements for them.

A few of our former writers were not able to make this distinction, and they, unfortunately, had to pay the price for it. Several job applicants who thought they were smarter than they were similarly had to look for other employment.

This is all to say that, in its current and foreseeable forms, we emphatically believe that ChatGPT by itself will not suffice as a direct replacement for human writers, at least for our agency’s needs.

And this is not because there are already AI tools available that can detect AI-generated outputs. Truth be told, experienced human editors and teachers can easily detect ChatGPT-generated content. The problem is far more fundamental: You simply cannot use it by itself to generate high-level content.

Reasons ChatGPT Won’t Replace Human Content Writers

Of course, we could be wrong. For all we know, developments in quantum computing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence might soon supercharge chatbots like ChatGPT and put our content team out of work. However, given what we know now, we’re confident that it won’t replace human content creators any time soon.

Here are just some of the reasons why we would never rely on current iterations of ChatGPT for content generation:

1) It Makes Serious Business-Ending Errors

For experienced writers in the digital marketing industry, pounding out 2,000 words in 6 hours is the easy part. The tough part is fact-checking everything and making sure that each completed piece presents a well-constructed and culturally-sensitive set of arguments. ChatGPT is quite terrible at all of these things.

Though ChatGPT may be able to produce impressive walls of text in seconds, the content it produces is often highly-inaccurate, argumentatively weak, and occasionally offensive. Additionally, it’s hard to tell if the tool is wrong unless you already understand the topic you’re asking it to work on. It’s also not unusual for it to return contradictory information from one paragraph to the next.

If you were to just use raw ChatGPT outputs for high-level landing pages or link building campaigns, you would almost certainly be spreading misinformation, which won’t be a good thing for you or your client. Unless you’re OK with increasing the amount of digital noise on the internet, the idea that you could use ChatGPT to generate any content you need on demand is simply untrue.

2) ChatGPT Has to Use Pre-existing Data

Though it is an incredible feat of technology, ChatGPT is not all that different from the text prediction tool you have you have on your smartphone. This is clear in the tool’s complete name: Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. But unlike your smartphone, it leverages a massive database of text, highly-complex algorithms, and supercomputing infrastructure to give you its eerily human-like output.

Nonetheless, like your phone’s text prediction capabilities, it is inherently limited by the data it is given. In ChatGPT’s case, its practical limits are expanded on and shaped by its inherently-flawed human developers during its “training” periods.

Consequently, while it may be decent at giving you a big-picture overview of a subject, it can’t always give you a lot of specifics and it can’t give you all the latest updates. More importantly, unlike a human writer, it cannot conduct new research to support or disprove its statements. This effectively limits the utility of the tool for generating content in areas far outside the limits of general knowledge.

3) It’s Ill-Suited for Content Generation in Highly-Technical Fields

ChatGPT’s reliance on pre-existing data and inherently-biased human trainers make it the wrong choice for creating content that is reliant on high levels of subject matter expertise. If important information is not available to it, it may be unable to contextualize highly-specific ideas and it may also miss the nuances of some words as they are used within an industry.

Thus, if you put it to work on highly-technical or obscure topics, there is a very high probability that it will return inaccurate outputs. But because of ChatGPT’s sophisticated language modeling, these errors are not always obvious to non-experts. This makes the tool quite treacherous in the hands of laymen as well as writers who have not bothered to do any serious research.

4) It’s Incapable of True Creativity

While ChatGPT can come up with seemingly-original combinations of words, it cannot independently generate new ideas that are outside of its database. Also, unlike a well-read human writer, it cannot strategically break convention for effect or use intuition to connect seemingly disparate bodies of knowledge.

This means that it simply cannot be creative in the same way a human content developer can be. The lack of true creativity makes it limited in its ability to create content that is profoundly surprising or engaging for human audiences. If you plan to do any serious content marketing with just ChatGPT, you’re going to be in for plenty of disappointment.

5) It Struggles to Create On-Brand Marketing Copy

Most brands that operate at the highest levels of their industry (i.e. the ones you want to work with) have defined public personas and target markets. While ChatGPT can get a writer off to a good start, it’s unlikely to produce copy that will match the tone and business objectives of major clients. By itself, it is likely to generate generic copy that will require significant editing to work within the context of a serious marketing campaign.

This is an important reason why SearchWorks will continue to rely on human writers. We serve very high-value clients, including major Philippine conglomerates and Fortune 500 companies. In addition, any content we create is public-facing and is tuned to each client’s brand and business goals. ChatGPT simply cannot meet the content requirements that most top-level businesses demand.

5) It Cannot Empathize Or Understand Emotions

As the real Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort often says, when you sell something, you need to make two arguments: a logical argument and an emotional one.

As buyers, most of us think we rely on logic in our buying decisions. However, astute marketers understand that it’s the emotional argument that makes people pull the trigger on most purchases. The fear of missing out, nostalgia, peer pressure, and even happy-looking colors are much bigger factors in our buying decisions than most of us would like to admit.

Unintuitively, there is even evidence to show that emotional arguments even figure into B2B (business-to-business) marketing more than they do for B2C (business-to-consumer). We may think that the typical purchase-by-committee process in organizations creates logical outcomes but the data indicates that it introduces even more emotions into business decisions.

This is an important point because as “human-like” as ChatGPT is, it is incapable of understanding human emotions. This means it cannot always make effective emotional arguments that will allow your landing pages to consistently generate qualified leads and conversions.

6) It Cannot Consistently Replicate the Subtleties of Human Communication

Once you’ve read and edited enough content created by ChatGPT, it becomes clear that it does not “write” or process information in a way that a real person would. This makes sense because humans don’t process words and ideas like a text prediction tool. We are much more fallible, intuitive, and volatile, and this ultimately makes us more relatable to other humans.

The content generated by ChatGPT tends to be in a very particular, oddly monocultural style that is squarely in a linguistic uncanny valley. While you could instruct ChatGPT to localize and humanize its content to an extent, it can often do this in an unsubtle or unnatural way that may not fit most marketing and SEO goals. This can present issues for highly localized SEO and content marketing, as different markets often use the same languages in very different ways.

7) ChatGPT Outputs Still Require Significant Editing

ChatGPT can give writers a good way to streamline topic ideation, hash out rough outlines, or get basic topic overviews. However, if you make it generate complex content for SEO or content marketing, the raw output will invariably leave much to be desired.

The tool is at its least conspicuous when you make it do simple tasks. If you need a simple formal invitation or a generic meta description for a page with straightforward content, ChatGPT can provide outputs that require minimal or no editing.

But ask it to do anything more complex and it’s likely to produce content that requires tweaking. Ask it to create landing page content for a client with very specific business goals and you might be better off writing everything from scratch. In any case, the fact that its outputs invariably require significant edits to be usable means that it won’t be replacing human writers and editors at most reputable agencies.

8) Many Claims About ChatGPT are Hyped or Deliberately De-contextualized

Sure, ChatGPT may have passed several professional exams. But have you considered what its average scores were or how many of those exams were open-book for human test takers? With that context, suddenly those stories are about as impressive as pocket calculators were to the general public in the 1970s.

Also, how many of those earlier ChatGPT news articles have you opened based on the title only to find out that the stories were deliberately taken out of context? We’re not especially qualified to comment on the quality of journalism these days but we know clickbait when we see it.

9) Google Won’t Let AI-Generated Content Win on the SERPs

I can’t claim to know what Google will or won’t do. I can only look at their recent history and their current place in the market to make an educated guess about how they will address the ever-growing pool of AI-generated content.

While they haven’t always been the most exemplary company, Google has consistently demonstrated its commitment to ensuring that Google Search remains the world’s most relevant search engine. This is a point that a lot of doomsayers miss when they say that ChatGPT will replace content writers.

Though ChatGPT does make some kinds of content generation easier, you have to ask yourself: what is the value of this AI-generated content for Google Search users? Will people actually trust content generated by ChatGPT over that written by real human experts?

The answer to these is probably “not much” and “no”, respectively. If I’m right, this means that Google Search will eventually aim to devalue AI-generated content, if it hasn’t already.

And as we established early on, there are already AI tools that can detect content generated by ChatGPT. It would be a trivial matter for Google to roll out an update to downgrade URLs with AI-generated content on its search results pages, citing this content type’s negative effects on the overall user experience.

We also have to bear in mind that OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, is a key Microsoft partner. Given the existential threat that Microsoft’s Bing AI with ChatGPT search engine poses to Google Search, it’s hard to imagine that Google won’t do something to reduce the value of AI-generated content on its platform, at least, not until Google Bard becomes more popular.

Final Thoughts

There is no doubt that we’ve reached a technological tipping point with ChatGPT. But as clever as it is, it isn’t quite clever enough to replace human content writers and other creative professionals. At least, not yet.

That said, it’s a tool that’s well worth exploring. If you are already an expert-level writer, ChatGPT can potentially give you a wide range of options for automating your workflows. If you’re barely capable of putting together a well-constructed article, ChatGPT will not help you produce the kind of public-facing content businesses and other entities need.

Do you think we’re off-base? We’d be happy to hear your take. Feel free to contact us to share your ideas on the future of SEO and content marketing.