I've been seeing an increasing number of people posting online saying that they feel like they're a bad writer because they assume that what AI does is "correct." And AI writing doesn't look like their writing.
You might be a good writer.
You might be a bad writer.
How your writing compares to AI has nothing to do with this determination.
Why AI-generated content isn't the goal
ChatGPT, Claude, and even dedicated AI writing apps produce content that is an average of everything that has come before. These tools were trained on blog posts, books, movie scripts, websites—anything written from the 19th century onward, more or less—and programmed to provide the statistical average of a sentence.
What that means is that if I type half of a sentence, the AI crunches numbers and words to figure out what, probabilistically, should appear next. And this is based on the contents of writing that already exists + how I'm talking to the AI and the words I'm using.
But average doesn't mean good. Yeah, there's fine literature in that AI training data. You know what else is in there? Reddit.
There's a lot of poorly written posts on Reddit. Hell, there are some poorly written books for sale. So AI writing doesn't equal good writing or how writing should be.
Plus, when it comes to writing for a website with SEO in mind, perfect sentence structure isn't as important as content that:
- Communicates your expertise on a subject as a real person.
- Makes it clear to see how your expertise comes from real-life experience.
- Lives on a website that has good authority (this comes over time with points one and two).
- Is presented in a trustworthy, not scammy or spammy, way.
Generative AI can't do that, but you can.
AI-generated content and SEO performance
I've been exploring the website traffic for a few large sites that I know use AI for content creation at this point in time.
- Site A: Gets nearly 40,000/mo fewer organic visitors per month after moving to an AI-first content process
- Site B: Lost 1,500 visitors per month (and hasn't regained it) in the year since adopting AI content tools.
- Site C: Organic traffic has gone down by about 50% over the past year, despite being a very established name in an industry that's doing well.
Now, I'm not actively involved in these websites' content and am gathering this data from an SEO tool, so there may be other factors at play. But to see drop after drop in traffic when the human content volume goes down is telling. While a switch to AI may not be the only factor driving these sites' visitor counts down, I believe it's a contributing factor.
Don't discount your own content because it doesn't match an AI
If you catch yourself struggling to make AI content "sound right" (i.e. like you) or find that you're extra-critical of your own work because it doesn't follow the same structure as what an AI produces, it's time to take a step back from the chat.
Letting yourself (or the writers you hire) produce human-generated content full of insights, expertise, and trustworthy human-ness is ultimately going to serve you better than producing a faster or higher volume of content generated by AI.
AI content is an average, and you're not. Don't let yourself, or your company, be watered down by an algorithm.