Businesses marketing artificial intelligence (AI) have recently started tapping me on the shoulder. The nudges are coming from ads in my social media feeds and email. I’ve ignored it until today.

For an upcoming client team meeting, I found it necessary to get beyond the thought pattern of just not liking AI at all. So, I researched. I read several blogs and watched videos so that I could wrap my head around how AI can blog for a human, and what ramifications it might hold for bloggers, or freelance writers, like myself.

In one of the AI demonstration videos, a blogger typed in the initial request. For example, write a blog post about the 10 things people need to know to raise chickens.

Within moments, the AI program whipped out an entire blog post.

If a human had written the blog, like me, when I write for clients, the first two paragraphs are often the most difficult. I see AI as a plus in that situation. If it could write an opening paragraph for me, I could clean it up and make it ‘mine.’ Is the cost of AI worth that? No, it is not. I am not getting into how much these services cost, though.

I’ve given you one pro. Which is when we are stuck in place and do not know how to write something, AI could be helpful. As a human, simply getting up from the keyboard and walking away for a few minutes typically clears my head and enables me to get the project started once I return to it.

The cons…I have several!

• Attribution – I saw no links attributing where AI got the information.
• Ethics – As writers, we don’t steal other people’s info, and if we do use it, we link to the writer’s work/websites, or wherever we find the information.
• Search Engines – I cannot imagine a search engine rating a blog highly (algorithms) for content that is not original. (Meaning, the bot had to have read thousands of blogs or articles. Can the attribution be AI? Hardly not.)
• AI wrote several paragraphs that were not related to the topic. (The blogger erased the paragraphs and clarified what she needed.)

The bottom line is that a human is still needed. A human must know the topic in order to describe the content needed to AI. Then, once the blog is written by AI, the human has to have enough knowledge of the topic to edit the AI-produced blog.

So, this is where I am with AI blogging at this point. I don’t like it, but it has some (minor) pluses (which do not outweigh the cons).

The creativity and ‘want’ that I feel when I must get my thoughts out on paper cannot be replaced by a machine. Most of my writing comes from the heart – a human element that artificial intelligence does not possess.

Prayer also goes into my writing. With AI writing, where is God in it?

I would love to hear your thoughts. Please comment below! Thanks.