Tapping into artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can be a powerful tool for content creators. However, it is a skill that needs to be honed and requires the correct prompts to allow AI to help produce content that delivers value in a unique style personal to the author.
Here Michelle Hughes, Head of Digital Marketing at Midlands law firm Higgs LLP, with a little help from AI, outlines her approach to using AI as a valuable content creation assistant. She discusses the importance of ensuring AI understands her writing style by asking follow-up questions and building on previous prompts. Michelle also talks about using AI to create article outlines and headings but with the need to assist AI by adding key facts and information and, most importantly, combining the indispensable human touch to produce content that resonates with an audience.
A style unique to you
It’s important to use AI as an assistant, not the end product. Ultimately, you still want to sound like you, not a robot churning out mediocre copy that provides no value to anyone. Therefore, AI needs to be helped to understand your unique writing style to be an effective content tool.
There is no doubt that AI is an intelligent tool. You can teach AI to interpret your tone, voice, and subtleties to produce content that reflects your individual style. To do this, you need to provide AI with samples of your previous writing to allow the algorithms to become familiar with your style and ensure that the content generated aligns with your natural tone of voice.
Building on prompts
While the content AI generates provides a good starting point, it still needs adjusting and fact-checking before you have a finished product. You can steer AI by asking follow-up questions and building on the prompts to adapt and refine the content output. Don’t be afraid to dive into the details; the content will need fine-tuning, so ask specific questions to clarify intent, tone, or desired emphasis.
For example, if the initial draft produced by AI seems too formal for your usual style or audience, you can ask, “Please, can you make this more conversational?”
Creating content outlines
It’s important to have a strategic approach when creating content for digital channels. You need to understand the algorithms for each channel to ensure you get the best from your content. This is where AI can help you with the structure of articles. Start by providing the AI with critical points, the intended channel for the content, the objective of the content and the key themes you want to cover. Then let the AI generate an outline and headings based on your input. You can add or adjust these with further prompts to get a detailed overview.
For example, if you’re writing about the benefits of AI in content creation, ask the AI to “Outline the major advantages of using AI in content creation and provide headings for each benefit.” The output will give you key headings and flow for a well-organised, reader-friendly article.
Guiding AI with relevant information
Giving the AI tool as many facts and relevant information as possible is vital to get the most out of AI as a content assistant. This will help add depth and credibility to your final content. By providing facts, statistics, or your opinion on a chosen topic, you can help AI weave the skeleton of a narrative together, grounded in accurate information.
The human touch
The beauty of AI tools is that they can handle a lot of the heavy lifting with content creation. It certainly helps with writer’s block and provides strong outlines to follow. However, the secret ingredient will always be the human touch; content shouldn’t be completely AI-generated. The initial draft can come from AI, but the content should be reviewed, and personal touches, insights, and examples should be added to reflect both your unique style and approach.
As AI would say, “In the ever-evolving landscape of web content creation, the synergy between human creativity and AI capabilities is the force that propels your content to new heights”, but in human terms, using AI as a content guide and enhancement tool can help you reduce the time needed to research and craft content. It will always, however, be the human element that will make the difference.
Michelle Hughes is the Head of Digital Marketing at Midlands law firm Higgs LLP.
