At Summari, we know a thing or two about content creation. Defined as the contribution of content to any media, especially digital media, for a specific audience, stellar content creation is crucial to the success of any publication, big or small. At Summari, we built a tool for publishers to leverage their content with helpful links that provide readers with more information and an enhanced user experience. While Summari is one tool for publishers, a few other AI-powered tools are promising to disrupt the content creation economy by making it easier than ever to write engaging content that captures your audience’s attention. 

No matter what tool you choose, the key to enhancing your content is making AI work for you. There are three ways that AI can help content creation. The first is using AI to generate ideas for pieces. AI can suggest ideas that will perform well based on your audience’s interests or behaviors. Two of the most popular tools come from HubSpot and Portent. HubSpot has a blog post idea generator that is powered by AI. Portent has a content idea generator that generates a catchy lead or title for writers. 

The second way that AI can help is by writing content. AI-powered content generators like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or GPT3, or Jasper can write copy in seconds. ChatGPT or GPT3 responds to user prompts like “Write a blurb about exciting trends in AI” with a block of content that the writer can edit before publishing. Jasper provides an advanced writing assistant that can help in every step of the writing process, from idea generation to writing copy to marketing content on social media. 

The third way that AI can help is by optimizing content for SEO, something which Summari excels at. AI can also help you rank higher with SEO by delivering insight about trending topics and creating high-ranking content by finding related keywords or rewriting content to include relevant keywords. AI can do the behind-the-scenes work to search for keywords that are driving content to rank on Google, freeing up writers to focus on the quality of the content. 

A few companies have already adopted AI to improve their content. AP News has been using AI to cover sports news since 2016. They started using AI to write coverage of Major League Baseball. AP partnered with a firm called Automated Insights to power the articles. The firm transforms raw data, like that generated in baseball, into stories and insights based on a template provided by AP. More recently, The Miami Herald began using artificial intelligence to write articles about Miami’s real estate market. Each article contains information about a sale, including the price, square footage, date of sale, and address. The Miami Herald Bot can produce a ton of content in a day; it published 50 articles in its first two and half weeks on the Herald’s staff. The tech-focused publication CNET is also experimenting with AI. CNET started experimenting with whether AI can be an effective writing assistant starting in November. Writers would use an AI engine to build a story draft or compile the information needed for a story; then, a writer and editor would review, fact-check, and edit the AI-assisted piece before it was published. From November through mid-January, CNET published 75 articles that were AI-assisted. 

Buzzfeed recently announced that it would adopt AI to personalize content and make quizzes more engaging for users. CEO Jonah Peretti said that AI-powered content creation would be a core part of the strategy for 2023. Peretti reassured the Buzzfeed staff that humans will very much still be at the helm, and all content generated or assisted by AI will be thoroughly vetted and reviewed before being published. The Wall Street Journal reported that Buzzfeed would use ChatGPT creator OpenAI to power the new era of content creation at the publisher. 

While adopting AI as a writing or content creation tool isn’t widespread yet, it is certainly an exciting new frontier gaining momentum. Before AI-assisted content becomes the norm, a few kinks need to be worked out. Many editorial teams experiment with AI tools, but few adopt the tools into their workflow in a meaningful way, either because they don’t have time to learn how to incorporate AI effectively or they are unsure about the ways that AI can help. Some editors see AI as a research tool that can take the burden of cumbersome research off the shoulders of writers. Some see AI as a tool to free up writers from needing to write repetitive, boring stories. AI tools are fantastic assistants for content creators; we can’t wait to see how users leverage our product and others to create even more engaging and helpful content.