At Passion Digital’s Future of Search breakfast briefing on 14th October, Frontier15 co-founder Jo Robb explored what human writers bring to content, and why it matters when AI increasingly helps people discover and understand brands.
schedule
Read time:
short_text
Word count:
AI never has a bad day. It doesn’t get distracted, make typos, have a brain freeze around the opening paragraph or decide that everything it wrote yesterday is rubbish. For a busy marketing team, that consistency is a very attractive (and efficient) proposition.
But is consistency the same as effectiveness? And when every competitor can produce polished content using the same tools, what makes yours worth reading?
Those were the questions I brought to Passion Digital’s Future of Search breakfast briefing in London last week. My talk, The robots never have a bad day, examined the difference between using AI to support good content and handing it responsibility for the work that makes a brand distinctive.
Faster production needs a purpose
Even as a professional copywriter who loves her craft, I use AI every day. It helps me organise research, challenge an argument, check consistency, and sort and put into order the thoughts I dictate while walking the dog.
My concern lies where those efficiencies become the whole ambition. Producing more content is easy to measure as an achievement. Whether that content gives somebody a reason to remember, trust, or simply choose your business takes rather more thought.
A clean structure and impeccable grammar are useful but, dare I say it, not the be all and end all of good content. It’s the detail and the nuance in writing that makes a reader feel understood and engaged on an emotional level. The unexpected observation or the conviction behind a point of view still needs someone behind it who knows what they want to say.
My approach is to use the time AI saves me to invest in that thinking, rather than simply filling more pages.
The evidence includes some awkward truths
My talk explored research into creativity, trust and people’s responses to AI-generated writing. The picture is more complicated than a simple contest between humans and machines. It’s not Humans v AI… it’s ‘where is the line?’.
Some studies find that readers prefer AI-generated work when they don’t know who wrote it.
Others show that knowing a person created something changes how people value it. Human authorship matters, but of course it doesn’t automatically make a piece of writing good.
The value from hiring a human to shape your written content comes from their judgement, their understanding of an audience and their ability to contribute something beyond a competent summary of what already exists. It’s their crafting of your message, in your voice, in a way that hooks the people you want to attract on an emotional level.
When AI describes your brand, do you recognise yourself?
The question of whether your brand stands out has always been important, from way back before ‘digital times’. But it has become particularly important in AI search.
When customers search through AI, the tools creating answers will draw on your website alongside information published elsewhere about your business. It then describes you in its own words.
The carefully chosen phrasing of your brand voice can disappear, making the substance behind it all the more important.
What does your business stand for? What expertise can you demonstrate? What do you contribute that someone else couldn’t?
Clear written content (and video scripts and transcipts, and captions, and meta data) written in a consistent, unique brand voice give both people and search systems something meaningful to work with. Generic copy leaves much more room for your brand to sound interchangeable with its competitors. To disappear in a sea of beige.
At Frontier15, this is where we focus: creating human-led content around a brand’s expertise and its customers’ questions, with visibility in traditional and AI search built into the work.
Put a person behind the work that matters
I wrapped up my Future of Search talk with some practical guidance for using AI where it helps and where human attention creates the value.
Use AI to support research and check a structure.
Ask it for a second opinion, sure, but give the original idea, the voice and the work that everything else builds on the attention they deserve.
Thank you to Passion Digital for inviting us to contribute, and to everyone who joined the morning and continued the conversation afterwards.
To talk about content that helps your business get found and gives people a reason to choose you, get in touch.
About the author
What we do
Frontier15 helps brands achieve visibility in the era of AI search, creating content strategies that make your expertise discoverable and trusted by both people and machines. Get in touch and ask us how we can map a GEO-informed content strategy that helps future-proof your brand.