As content marketers, it can be easy to forget what our actual jobs are. When we measure ourselves on the quantity and range of work we produce, we can forget what that work is meant to accomplish: Namely, the effective communication of key messages to our audiences.
The use, and misuse, of AI tools by marketing teams has made this mistake quite clear, with teams celebrating the speed and quantity of content produced, without ever considering if it is actually targeted at the right audience.
As writers adopt AI tools across their workflows, they also neglect new AI audiences who have now emerged. Rather than using AI, we should be targeting it, and improving the AI visibility of our brands and content.
Issues with AI-written content
As valuable as tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini are to the writing and editing process, AI-generated content is still highly inconsistent. When prompted correctly, given a strong perspective, and carefully edited, it reads very well, but when lazily produced on short notice it is painfully obvious, and completely ineffective.
We’ve all been inundated with “AI slop”, particularly on social media platforms where monetising these tools can be very cost-efficient (looking at you X). When left unchecked, ChatGPT will constantly rely on the same tricks, using false profundity, overly confident descriptive statements, and the classic “not only x, but y” sentence structure.
A year or two ago this content might have slipped by un-noticed, but today it is immediately obvious to readers. Many marketing teams are clearly relying on these tools, and are seemingly oblivious to how lazy and aimless it makes them look.
What writing tells us
Traditionally, one of the things that written communication signalled was effort. If you sat down to write a letter, or carve a stone tablet, you were signalling that what you were writing was worth writing. This was a useful signal in many ways, because it let audiences know that an author had some skin in the game, and had expended time and effort in the creation of their content.
AI has scrambled this signal. Just because we see a piece of written, visual, or video content, does not mean that somebody actually thought it was worth making. Rather, it signals that at a minimum an AI agent may have been trusted to produce it. This cheapens the perceived value of all content, especially when readers cannot immediately distinguish between human and AI content.
The good news is that this signal can be re-established over time for your brand, and can provide your content with an advantage over competitor content produced with AI. When everyone has an incentive to remove effort from their writing, you can stand out simply by doing things in a slightly more challenging way.
An AI audience, not an AI author
One of the benefits of having authentic and intentful content is that it stands out from the crowd, and clearly communicates the unique value of your brand and product. This is crucial for gaining visibility on AI tools, which will look for content that is legitimate, factual, and unique when responding to prompts.
Ironically, churning out low quality AI-written pieces will damage your ability to reach your audience on AI platforms. And your audience on these platforms are very valuable. As one study found, a session from ChatGPT is nine times more likely to convert than one from Google.
AI visibility is a constantly evolving topic, but fortunately the team at Kooba have written a lot about it already. You can read some of our most recent articles on the subject below:
- How To Maximise AI Visibility in 2026
- The AI Evolution: Why You High Performing Website is More Critical Than Ever
- Rank Higher in Atlas Searches with an Accessible Website
- What Analytics Can (And Can't) Tell You About AI Traffic
How to get the most out of AI tools, and maximise AI visibility
From a practical perspective, how can content writers get the most out of these tools? The key is staying attached to strategic decisions and creative thinking, whilst offloading the less thrilling work of citation, editing, and SEO to your AI co-workers. So long as your content strategy is driven by a purposeful and strong perspective, it doesn’t matter if a LLM or a human writes the sentences.
As my (human) co-worker Tom Gillan argued recently, AI agents need to be used in clearly defined contexts where they can experiment and express themselves freely, whilst humans take care of their own unique responsibilities. It’s an appealing hybrid approach, and one which I use frequently when producing content.
How writing informs strategy
A final point relates to strategic thinking. When we promote our brands with content, we want to do so strategically. This is to say, we have a series of goals we seek to achieve, and a series of strategies that we use to do so. But the best systems are self-learning, and iterate the underlying strategy based on findings in the messy world of reality.
One benefit of writing content for yourself is that it forces you to actually engage with the ideas you discuss. In doing so, you clarify and formalise what may otherwise have been unstructured thoughts and feelings. The production of content will feed back into the content strategy, updating your plan as you learn from the writing process itself.
AI tools can rob us of this possibility when used incorrectly, as they let us avoid the hard work of really thinking about what we say. This leads to content that is increasingly detached from the interests of our target audience, regardless of how fast it is produced.
If you want to produce purposeful, effective content that actually does its job and ranks on search engines and AI platforms, just get in touch with our team today. We’d love to hear from you.
