The myth of "AI can write it"

Content design is at a crossroads and AI is coming to save us

As a content designer, there are a few phrases that have always made my blood run cold. “I already designed it so can you just drop in the copy?” is a classic, but a new one has come up lately that’s starting to keep me up at night: “We’ll just use AI to write it.”

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

You might think this is just because I’m another writer wringing my hands about AI taking my job. The truth is I know that AI can’t take my job because I know how much content strategy and design goes into AI-generated content. The problem is that many of my cross-functional partners don’t.

Almost two years ago, I wrote about how AI is creating opportunity for content designers. Not to say “I told you so,” but… I told you so. Every team I work with is actively using AI or exploring how they can and every team actually using AI is rapidly discovering just how much work it takes — and the importance of content designers at the helm.

But there’s a gap between the idea of “using AI” and funding teams appropriately to do so. While companies are quick to hire more ML engineers, they’re often overlooking the need to scale up content design too. I suspect this is because they view AI as replacing the need for writers rather than understanding that AI creates the need for more content designers (and lawyers, but that’s another topic for another day).

If you’ve ever worked on prompt generation, you already know how much time it takes to get it right. You also know how much iteration and review you need to do before you can actually publish this content, and how much collaboration is required between content design, applied science and the ML engineers to train the model. All of this is on top of the work required to set the content strategy, run the experiments, figure out the design and put it all in front of users. AI reduces the amount of writing content designers have to do but, if anything, it increases the amount of meaningful strategic work on our plates.

AI reduces the amount of writing content designers have to do but, if anything, it increases the amount of meaningful strategic work on our plates.

Content designers have long been plagued by the perception that we’re “just writers” and that misconception is rapidly leading us into a resourcing crisis. The good news is that as we expand our work in AI, our partners begin to see the value we bring in a completely new way. The bad news is that we’re being asked to take on AI efforts on top of our existing workloads and it’s simply untenable.

So what can we do about it? Content design leaders need to educate our partners about how content designers are driving AI efforts — and what it really takes to “get AI to write it.” When we see roadmaps with vague, hand-wavy references to AI, we need to call them out. We need to ensure our teams are upskilled and ready to drive AI efforts and position ourselves as leaders in this space. This is an opportunity for us to prove the value of our discipline in a tangible way and finally, finally, get recognized as the strategic partners we’ve always been.

But above all, we need to stop eying AI with suspicion and fully embrace it. When you hear someone say “AI will write it,” look at it at the opportunity it is — not a threat.