I Had a Robot Write 30 Good Articles for Me. Where Do I Go From Here?

What was written and what was learned when using artificial intelligence to write 30 different pieces of writing.

On the last day of February, I started a 30-day writing experiment to demonstrate how far artificial intelligence (AI) has come in the writing world. I used a popular AI writing platform and published 30 articles mostly written by a “robot”. I only published those articles during the weekdays, and the 30 articles were completed last Friday. You can read the initial article explaining the experiment here:

The goal was to show Medium writers what they’re up against. I experimented with a variety of writing topics and genres but mostly focused on non-fiction and blog-type content.

You can find that full list of 30 articles here, and note they are completely free to read since I used a brand new Medium handle to ensure they couldn’t be behind Medium’s paywall:

Important note: I’m a beginner to this AI writing platform so I flopped in a few areas. This could be due to personal inexperience and is not necessarily demonstrative of a lacking in the platform. To be continued…

It was a fun experiment and I’m glad I did it. I believe the emergence of AI writers is a threat to certain types of writing industries. When an enemy becomes public, it’s important to study that enemy so you can prepare yourself and course correct.

Lessons Learned

As with any experiment, I learned a few lessons along the way.

#1-AI writers will never fully replace human writers

Take a big sigh of relief.

Some writers may fear their entire world is being taken over by technology. I don’t think that will happen in anyone’s current lifetime. Yes, AI will get better over time. And it will take over and dominate certain writing markets, but it can never fully take over all of writing.

As I generated each content post with my robot what I saw was nothing special. Although most of it can pass for sellable work — passion, heart, and a certain genuine feel were missing.

It felt homogenized.

It felt boring.

And to be honest, the way these AI writing platforms are created, you’re not supposed to use them to generate 100% of your content. You’re supposed to use them as assistant writers. In this way, I can easily see a successful market for them. Helpers, not authors.

Also, fiction was a big issue. As fiction is my focus, I wanted to know how well my robot could generate a decent piece of fiction. So far, I’m not impressed. I think AI writing platforms lack creative genius today. I do expect that to evolve and improve in the next 10-20 years.

Part of this fiction failure might have been due to my lack of knowledge on how to properly use the platform to generate fiction. This is an area I’m going to invest more time into. There is a world of AI writing platforms out there — the one I use does very well at non-fiction, not fiction. It’s possible I need to switch AI writing platforms.

Finally, I did not use my robot to generate headlines for each post. I did that intentionally. Instead, I took the approach of creating my own non-optimized headlines and then had the robot use those as a guide for the content.

There are features to generate headlines through the AI writer, but what I saw wasn’t optimized nor sexy. It wasn’t clickbait, either. Since I didn’t want to spend more than 5–10 minutes on each post, I left this for a later time. This will be an experiment for the future.

P.S. — you can have your AI writing platform generate a headline, all the subheadings, and then also the content. Slick, isn’t it? I might do that as a future experiment and share the results.

#2-But AI writers will replace some human writers

It’s already happening. Some writers on sites like Upwork and Fivver are already using AI to quickly generate content for customers. With AI writing platforms, content can be generated very quickly. This means those writers can charge cheaper rates. This also means, theoretically, the average cost of this type of content might be brought down across the board.

With the dismal rates many content mills already pay writers, imagining worse pay is a punch to the gut. Take heed, my content writer friends— you may want to consider a different path. I have already changed my course. If you love content, you can keep at it…but adjust. You can make a good living embracing AI writing platforms and using them alongside your work. It’s already becoming mainstream.

Areas where I know writers are already using this type of technology to generate writing: marketing/ad copy, blog content, and non-fiction books. I’ve seen the proof. There are writers making money using writing platforms in this way and killing it.

With blog content especially, savvy writers are using this technology in conjunction with powerful SEO tools to create articles that rank high on search engines. A few are even making *thousands* of dollars a month or per assignment, either directly from their own website or for customer websites. And all for a few hours of effort. The average human may take 2–10 times that amount of time to generate the same output.

This made me take a hard look at where I was spending my time writing for money. I will most likely stop all content mill writing this year. I make pennies on each word and it’s a huge time suck to follow the strict rules, formatting, and subjective guidelines. It can be a guaranteed source of income, however, but it’s just not something I love. And I don’t want to compete in an area that’s possibly going to pay worse over time.

#3-Writers need to be smart about what’s coming

Writers need to be aware of what’s happening out there and who can replace them for cheap. For instance, I know there are writers on Medium who are using AI writing platforms to generate posts for Medium. I have no idea what percentage of writers are doing this, but it’s an uphill battle I don’t want to fight.

This has caused me to rethink my personal strategy for Medium. Instead, I will be more selective and choose topics where I can inject my wisdom, unique style, and heart. I’m convinced this is what I should’ve been doing all along. But, as we all know, writing is a journey.

Do I think AI writing platforms will replace Medium writers? Yes and no. I think the best writers who are genuine and can relay excellent, personal stories with minimal “surface level” wisdom will continue doing well. But the “dime a dozen” advice articles that can be written easily by robots (and less easily by humans) is bad news for all of us. Especially if clickbait headlines are used. This type of content may end up flooding feeds and making readers numb to those types of headlines.

Be ahead of the curve. Don’t create content like this.

Build a brand around you. And be persistent, but patient.

The Ethics of Using AI Writing Platforms

One of the big debates out there is whether or not using AI writers is unethical. It’s hard to have an opinion on this since this space is changing dramatically every year.

I believe AI writers will continue to consume more of the marketplace, and I think the proper way to use them is as assistant writers. To save time. Which equates to saving money. This is already becoming a mainstream practice and I don’t see that trend slowing down.

In that respect, it doesn’t matter what I think because the market will demand and then create the next accepted writing practice. When people knowingly pay for the output these platforms generate and this practice consumes the new way of writing content, these ethics questions will disappear.

Some people equate using AI writing platforms to using ghostwriters. And while that opens a whole other can of worms that I won’t go into here, I don’t feel it’s comparing apples to apples. Human ghostwriters leverage unique, human creativity. Yes, humans are influenced by works from other writers over their lifetimes, but what they are capable of can truly be unique.

AI writers predict/summarize tone, style, word choices, and content that’s been authored by millions of human (and robot) writers on the internet. That just means it passes the plagiarism check. They can’t fully comprehend what they’re writing the way a human can, and in some cases, whether or not it makes sense. In that way, AI writers can’t ever be truly unique (in the most genuine sense) and they can’t compare to human writers.

The very best writing pieces won’t ever be 100% authored by robots — a human will be involved in some way, shape, or form. In my opinion, that changes the ethics debate to something that more closely resembles the question “is this uniquely yours” instead of the ghostwriting question of “is this someone else’s?” Although a subtle change, it’s a different debate. But one thing I will say is the AI writing platform I’ve been playing with very clearly stipulates that anything you generate with your robot is 100% yours. So at least that question is not in contention with the AI writing platform itself.

Where To Go From Here

I won’t be closing down my new robot Medium handle. Instead, I plan to keep using it for what it is today, a place to publish examples of content written by AI. I do plan to experiment more with fiction and share those experiments on that handle.

In the meantime, I also don’t plan to put that handle into the Medium Partner Program. First of all, I don’t meet the requirements now. However, the goal was never to make money off of information that I wanted to share freely.

From time to time, I will post updates about that experiment on this Medium profile, and they will be behind the paywall. After all, I have to try to earn back some of the money I’m spending on the AI writing platform. 😂

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