Are You Truly a Better Skier if You Climb the Mountain?

Today, I want to address a topic that seems to be making rounds in the online business world, and here within WA.

To leap off of a discussion I just had in a live chat. I want to talk about something fundamental... the essence of creativity and human effort.

With the looming presence in our lives with AI (artificial intelligence) arriving, a lot of people are wondering if human language content is going to win the "content race", in particular in the world of SEO.

Let's have a look here.

Human-generated Content vs. AI-generated Content. Who Wins?

Just like there's always that heated argument about whether you're a better skier if you climb the mountain, there's also an ongoing debate about whether human-generated content is always superior to AI-generated content.

Is it, though?

I get it... it's easy to be skeptical about AI and automation. After all, we are HUMANS, we want to believe we are better at human activities than robots or technology, but then the tech to replace us arrives and we have to come to the realization that perhaps that the very thing we have been doing since we started learning to write, might be something that can be completely replaced.

Well, not completely replaced. We are creative, passionate, and quite often unpredictable. We tend to believe that nothing beats human touch, and this belief extends to content creation as well, and this creativity, passion and unpredictability has to come from somewhere.

But let's put it into perspective for a moment.

Just because something is "human-generated", doesn't mean it's always superior. There are plenty of humans out there producing less than stellar content. You know what I'm talking about... content riddled with grammar errors, spelling mistakes that'd make your old English teacher cringe, and sentence structures that make it next to impossible to digest as a reader.

So that begs the question...

Does Human Effort Always Equate to Superior Results?

To further illustrate this point, let's take a quick detour from the digital landscape and step into the great outdoors.

A human tilling a field, armed with nothing but their trusty old hoe, might feel a sense of satisfaction with every bead of sweat that trickles down their brow... BUT (and a big but), does that make their work superior to a modern farming machine that can till acres upon acres in a fraction of the time?

This is the reason the industry revolution happened in the first place. Machines were better, more efficient, more consistent and accurate, and more productive at accomplishing the same thing.

There was a fret of these machines stealing all the jobs, but instead what it allowed is the workers to become more efficient, and solve much bigger problems....and to grow produce, wheat, and fruit for millions more people.

The exact same logic applies to skiing.

A human hiking up a ski mountain, breaking a sweat and feeling the burn, may feel more accomplished than the person who rides up the chairlift, but are they necessarily a BETTER skier?

Other than being in better shape and perhaps earning a few bragging rights, the answer is, probably not.

So why should content creation be any different?

Is Manual Typing the Magic Ingredient to High-Quality Content?

Let's bring it back to our world now...

The world of affiliate marketing, SEO, and building successful online businesses. Just because you're physically typing on a keyboard and ultimately taking a lot more time to create your content, doesn't mean that your content is automatically going to be better than something created in an automated fashion.

It's not the medium that matters, it's the message.

The end goal is to provide value. To give your readers useful, interesting, and engaging content. To captivate them. To help them. So whether that content is created by human hands or through artificial intelligence (or a hybrid of both), if it delivers on that promise, then it is the winning formula.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that AI is going to replace human writers any time soon... or at all. We're not close to being there yet (but we are working quietly behind the scenes on some pretty relevant tech related to this), but to dismiss it entirely simply because it's not human-generated?

That is equivalent to refusing to use a chairlift and insisting on climbing the mountain every time you get to the bottom of the hill, even though the chairlift is available. You might feel a sense of accomplishment, but you're not necessarily a better skier, just a more tired one!

Let's focus on what matters here, irrespective of how it is accomplished. Creating high-quality content that resonates with our audience, no matter how it's generated.

Keep that in mind, and you'll be hitting the "pow" of the slopes of success in no time, whether you took the chairlift or climbed the mountain!

Till next time, keep your content strong and your conversions stronger!