AI is like a gift to businesses. 

It can create social media captions, blog posts, product descriptions, and more, allowing brands to reach a wider audience and increase their online presence.

For marketers, it’s a short-cut to deliverables.

But as someone who has has been delving into SEO and digital marketing since 2008, this is déjà vu. Ranking in Google was just as vital to businesses, and marketers were looking for ways to crack Google’s algorithm. And a lot of strategies worked… or… worked for a while, and then crashed our rankings. 

And this is why our generation of marketers have a subconscious fear of the Panda. Let’s look at the evolution of digital marketing in relation to quick fixes.

Gather round kids, Tita has a story…

Article Spinners and Content Automation Replacing SEO Teams

Back in the day, Google was all about Content. Content was King! and before the Google updates happened, Google just wanted us to churn out as many as possible. And thus, article spinning was born…

“Article spinning is a writing technique used in search engine optimization, and other applications, which creates what deceitfully appears to be new content from what already exists.” – Wikipedia

There were many tools out there that could spin articles, but there were power tools like SENuke that could 

• search for keywords, 
• solve captchas, 
• create blogs, 
• spin articles, 
• post them, 
• link to keywords, 
• bookmark those articles 
• all done under proxies to pretend they were done by real people. 

With these tools, our rankings rose to #1 real fast, earning us real good money.

There were fears it would replace SEO Teams. 

And then, beginning 2012, Google rolled out updates like Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird. These cute animals became our worst enemy, smashing through our spam content and bad links, and demanded better. 

Our rankings didn’t just crash, our websites were also “sandboxed”. 

To recover, SEO Teams were hired to manually remove all the bad links, improve the quality of our sites, and create actual valuable content. 

That took MONTHS!

Granted these tools were far from AI, but they served the same function which was to minimize our actual work. And they were great if used correctly, but as humans, the temptation to abuse it and spam the web for rankings was too strong. And we suffered from the effects of rolling out these bad articles.

Lessons: 

• A lot of bad articles do not equal a single good article. 
• Content is for humans, not just Google.
• Tools did not replace SEO Teams. 
• It elevated them to make sure articles had substance and links provided value.

Canva Replacing Designers

With the rise of social media, it was apparent that Blogs were not enough to promote businesses. You needed fancy visuals. So apart from writers, we also needed designers. I could write, but didn’t know how to use Photoshop, which is why, Canva was refreshing.

I first heard of Canva when I saw Guy Kawasaki promoting it back in 2014. And as I’m writing this, I can hear gasps of, “OMG you’re such a tita.”

It was a huge help to marketers who had to comply with graphic requirements of promoting their business in the social media age without knowing how to use Photoshop. 

That’s why I wrote several articles and created videos on it.

A lot of people said, Canva will replace designers!

Pretty soon, social media was flooded with thoughtless designs, unmodified Canva templates with clashing colors and watermarked elements. 

These designs didn’t come from clueless business owners, but were mass creations of “social media managers” looking for a shortcut. These were “compliance” designs submitted to their poor clients. Designs that were not only unpleasant, but also ineffective and lacked imagination.

Lessons:

• Even with awesome Canva features, bad design still exists. Canva is a tool, you still need to utilize it to its full potential to create EFFECTIVE designs. 
• Canva democratized design by creating an easier version photoshop. 
• It did not replace designers. It allowed non-technical people to express their creativity in design and use it for marketing.

AI Replacing Writers 

(and many more, but I’ll focus on the writing aspect)

You already know what AI like ChatGPT is capable of. And at first glance, sure it can create some pretty good blog posts and captions. 

It has the ability to scrounge the internet for existing content, pick individual ideas from different articles, and write a new blog post based on thoughts already written.

If you’re that kind of writer, consider yourself REPLACED.

But in marketing, emotions weigh heavier than facts. This is why a lot of sh*t products are sold just because they told a good story.

But AI writing is emotionless. You can instruct it to write an emotional story, but it has no empathy like a human does. 

Lesson:

• If you’re the kind of writer who knows the facts, knows your target market, and can empathize with their pains, you are invaluable. 
• (Even the AI needs you to make your content so it can go and recreate it. LOL)
• And in that sense…
• AI cannot replace humans.

Marketing is like nurturing a relationship

Us Marketers should have learned our lesson by now. 

New tools should be INCLUDED in our strategies.

New tools should NOT be the ONLY strategy.

We should evolve, and be agile. We need to consider algo changes, new tools and new media to make sure we continue to be relevant and effective.

Marketing is just like relationships. You need to put in the effort for it to work. 

AI Writing tools can make a draft for you, a more comprehensive outline if you will. But you can’t just leave it as that. The eye of a trained writer will know what to tweak to make it interesting enough for the market. 

Analytics and AB testing can assist with identifying which material is best but it needs quality content to start with.

Am I anti AI? No. I have always been a fan.

Did I write this article with the assistance of AI? Sure I did. 

It gave me parts of the intro which I edited.

It summarized certain sections.

It gave me fillers.

In conclusion, writers and marketers need AI to help speed up and improve on writing, but AI need human writers to add on perspective, empathy, creativity and emotions.