The Two Secrets to Preventing ChatGPT From Ruining Your Content’s Quality

Generative AI can be a great writing assistant — but artificial intelligence will never replace a skilled human copywriter.

When writing, is our goal simply to create as much as we can at the fastest pace possible? Is productivity all that matters? Or do we actually want to achieve something meaningful?

The internet hasn’t been the same since OpenAI introduced its infamous chatbot in late 2022. Many view this as a positive shift, especially in business. Proponents of generative AI are constantly shouting from the rooftops about its ability to “maximize efficiency.” By offloading the grunt work to robots, people can focus on more critical projects, they say.

While some research may prove that claim to be accurate, here’s the thing:

Good-quality written content is actually incredibly important. And so it shouldn’t be a task we primarily delegate to a machine. And yet, people treat writing as a means to an end and a trivial task to tick off their checklists quickly. Search engine optimization has turned content creation into a competition of who can best trick the algorithm and generate the most traffic. And too often, people carelessly use ChatGPT to get ahead in this game.

Of course, the easiest method for avoiding the harmful effects of artificial intelligence in our work is simply not using it. This is easy to do if you want to write for pleasure or if you’ve got time to give the task the attention it deserves. However, completely forgoing generative AI isn’t realistic in many business environments that demand constant output to succeed.

So, I’ve realized that if I’m going to use generative AI for copywriting, I need two things to write content that people find valuable and actually want to read: 1) something to say, and 2) knowledge to back it up.

Develop a clear, strong message for your writing — on your own.

In our rapidly-devolving capitalist horrorscape, it sometimes feels as if AI’s overreliance on corporate jargon is poised to play a crucial role in destroying all hopes of creativity and originality in the content we consume.

If you’re familiar with ChatGPT’s writing style that I just attempted to satire, you also likely understand the frustration of constantly encountering these repetitive terms that riddle almost everyone’s writing online: fast-paced, landscape, vibrant, underscore, empower, bustling, seamless, tapestry, enhance, ensure…I could go on.

The tool basically talks about every subject the same way, from hunting and marketing to healthcare and personal finance. And even if you try to craft a well-worded prompt, every output has an overly sales-y veneer with fluffy, sensational language. Seriously, not everything can be “game-changing!”

The problem with AI’s tendency to discuss everything using the same signature voice, word choices, and sentence structure isn’t just that everything sounds repetitive. It’s that it’s clear evidence that these tools aren’t designed to generate original insights.

Have you ever noticed that the articles that contain these clear markers of generative AI don’t just use the same words, but they all tend to communicate identical ideas? It’s highly unlikely you’ll finish an article littered with this language having acquired new knowledge.

These large language models work by aggregating and synthesizing existing content. And then they package these summaries in wrapping paper it takes right off the assembly line! If we don’t know what we want to say and ask ChatGPT to produce an outline or the entire text itself, we’ll end up with something that’s a poor echo of everything already said.

Not only will we not have any unique observations, but if we ask the tool the same questions as everyone else because we don’t already have a clear thesis, we’ll just get the same output, with little to no variation.

So, what’s the lesson here?

Never let ChatGPT write your first draft.

If you want your copy to be compelling and meaningful, please at least create your outline yourself, even if you don’t have the time or capacity to write every word from scratch. Obviously, it sucks when your brain feels like mush, you can’t articulate your thoughts, and you spend too long staring at a blank screen. But we need to be able to sit in that discomfort and learn how to brainstorm rather than taking a convenient shortcut that leads to mediocrity.

If we’re creating content to market a product or service, don’t we want copy that really speaks to the value we’ll bring to our target audience? Otherwise, how can we cut through the noise to get sales?

Yes, we can use ChatGPT for writing tasks like copyediting or suggestions to make things more concise, but we can’t rely on the tool to tell our unique story. If we want to write something compelling, we need first to understand our offering, and importantly, we should understand it in detail. We need to know the nitty-gritty specifics and purpose behind its features and benefits and be able to communicate the outcomes people will experience. We need to know the why, the what, and the how. All before we write a single word!

And if we’re not writing to sell something but simply to share our perspectives with our community, why should we ask ChatGPT, Grammarly, or another platform to tell us what those ideas are? We don’t need to write LinkedIn posts or Quora answers for the sake of writing them—we want to contribute positively to our community.

So if you’re struggling to express yourself or you’re still honing your views on a subject, you don’t need to write! Spend some time reading, in nature, or living in the world, and ideas will find you — trust me.

Convey actual facts or opinions.

I’m not a Luddite who refuses to get with the times. When I’m completing my assignments for my freelance copywriting business, I use artificial intelligence tools all the time. I always have tabs open with ChatGPT and Grammarly — both of which I find to be excellent virtual assistants or elevated thesauruses when I’m writing the umpteenth article about Zero Trust cybersecurity or Software-as-a-Service and need to add some variety. Generative AI is helpful as long as you guide the process with good prompts and only use it for inspiration, not to do your work for you.

Yet, as a citizen of the internet, I see that many people are doing exactly that — churning out fully AI-written articles at lightning speed and publishing them for the world to read.

Although SEO specialists purportedly care about writing for both robots and humans simultaneously, my browsing history shows that is likely untrue for the vast majority of them.

My daily online experience involves encountering too much unremarkable and vague content that doesn’t say anything worthwhile.

For example, I recently wanted to research the health benefits of incline walking. My search yielded an article on a well-known fitness website that shall remain anonymous. I thought, “Surely, this will give me valuable information!” Nope. It was littered with Chat-GPTisms and basically talked in circles without actually giving me real takeaways about how to improve my physical well-being.

If a fitness website lacks the confidence and internal staff knowledge to produce informative articles that teach actual science-backed material, it doesn’t bode well for people’s ability to learn a subject in depth on any topic online.

So, what should we do, instead of relying on ChatGPT to teach our audience for us?

Go beyond the surface level.

Here’s the problem: since these LLMs essentially function by scraping all of the internet’s knowledge and summarizing it, they can only ever give us a surface-level understanding of any subject matter.

But that’s not what we need to progress as a society. We need people to communicate specialized information with the necessary depth and accuracy to help us learn. If we only learn from generative AI, diluted expertise will continue to feed into itself until the internet is simply a sea of ChatGPT articles talking to each other, and we, as humans, know nothing at all.

So if you’re going to publish educational articles online, dive deep into real information. Share in-depth case studies, statistics, research, rigorous analysis…or, at the very least, ideas that ground your writing in reality and specificity. No need to write novel-length articles — brevity is still king — but give your reader more than just what’s common knowledge about a subject.

Remember, humans will always matter.

It’s not dramatic to say that sharing information is integral to the human species surviving and thriving.

If we don’t have the skills to communicate ideas effectively, how can we teach people practical skills like cooking, budgeting, or home maintenance? How can we share important updates about local health risks, weather conditions, or safety alerts?

We’ll also lack the ability to build relationships, let alone live in a world where arts and culture can actually entertain us, inspire us, and cause us to feel genuine emotion.

If we automate everything, we won’t have anything left to think about nor any purpose to drive us forward. And that doesn’t really sound like a world that’s great to live in, does it?