What Happens When AI Becomes Your Team’s First Draft Writer?

With shorter timelines, expanded editorial calendars and ever-increasing requests for highly valuable content; it’s no wonder that most content teams now use artificial intelligence (AI) to help them write the first drafts of their work faster than ever before!

To make things even simpler, typically, the AI will provide some basic assistance to get the ball rolling and then the team will finish up by editing and polishing it from that point.

However, there are many unexpected and complicated issues that can arise when using AI to provide the first draft of a piece of content. If you are not fully informed of these possible problems, the long-term value of the content you create could be significantly diminished over time.

Your Team Starts Catching Problems Rather Than Creating

Drafts written with the help of artificial intelligence make the writers invest time evaluating more than creating the draft. This adds a significant new level of responsibility to a creative process generally under-evaluated by teams.

An AI checker can now act as an additional quality control step in the workflow of an editorial team. An editor can quickly identify parts of a piece that are generic, repetitive and unengaging.

Since AI-generated drafts follow a familiar pattern, all drafts seem to read alike. The challenge is the repetitive style and not poor grammar.

Editors need to be trained to be able to determine whether a draft has the appearance of a ‘constructed from parts’ versus ‘written’. Mastering the art in this area requires a commitment of thought and resources.

Originality Becomes a Real Concern, Not Just a Theoretical One

There’s a risk of originality when using AI to create a first draft. AI’s databases are made of huge amounts of data already in existence, and as such, it produces output that has the potential to create an editorial risk for the publisher and writer.

To ensure quality, teams must address plagiarism before publishing. However, removing plagiarism from AI text requires a more nuanced approach than for human work.

A human writer has already put their own creative slant on ideas they have borrowed from others, whereas the AI simply rearranges the same idea or familiar sentences, making it seem as if the material was borrowed from someone else, regardless of whether it is or not.

To avoid this, editors need to look beyond surface checks and rewrite any content that they identify as derivative, include original thoughts, and ensure the final draft is written in their team’s voice.

Output Volume Goes Up, But Consistency of Voice Goes Down

AI allows for rapid writing. What once took 3 hours can now be done in 1 hour. The challenge of producing so many drafts quickly, without being monitored, poses its own set of issues for brands.

When an AI creates drafts from different types of topics, they all tend to have a different and inconsistent voice.

You will see that varying prompts create varying tones, meaning that without a style guide or review, there will be a sense of disconnection between AI-created content and the audience.

Because of all these inconsistencies, human editors must put in a lot of effort translating AI-generated drafts into the brand’s voice.

This heavy lifting requires skilled editors who understand the brand, as well as the authority to correct AI-generated drafts.

Subject Matter Expertise Gets Exposed Very Quickly

Although authors have access to a competent framework for argument formulation and topic summarisation from an AI draft, true competence cannot be achieved through AI drafts alone.

In highly specialised areas such as medicine, finance, or technology, it is immediately apparent that an expert’s work is, and should be, of significantly greater precision and dependability than an AI.

The reader will easily see that there are vague generalisations and that the information presented is constructed as opposed to understood. For this reason, experts should always be employed to review the material when creating an AI draft.

The AI draft establishes the foundation for creating the document; however, it is up to a qualified expert to provide the details of the document. If there are no in-house experts, the AI draft presents a false sense of completion, resulting in no confidence in the reader.

Your Brief-Writing Skills Become the Most Important Variable

What the majority of teams overlook is that the quality of the input given to AI will influence the quality of the output.

A vague prompt will generate a non-specific draft; however, a well-structured and detailed brief is a good foundation to produce an original piece of content or document.

This means that all the creative planning for the piece falls squarely on the shoulders of the brief writer, who must determine the appropriate angle, tone, structure, and way to differentiate the content before writing.

With brief writing now being the most essential part of creating content, teams that distribute resources toward developing templates and training are producing significantly better results with AI than teams that do not.

When teams use prompts as a shortcut, they end up with empty content. Brief writing is where all the creativity happens; everything else is just about executing.

Your Editing Pipeline Needs to Be Rebuilt Around AI Outputs 

Before, the majority of editorial workflows catered to human authors and had sequential progression through the process from first draft to final product. However, when AI creates the first draft, these editorial processes must be adapted.

Now, the first pass of reviewing content must occur earlier in the process and must go into much more detail than before. The editor must not only be responsible for editing grammar and continuity in the document.

The editor should also review and verify the factual accuracy of the document; this is because AI tends to provide false or fabricated information regarding facts. The editor also needs to check to see if the document’s structural arrangement is correct and supplies something of unique value.

It is the unique value that creates the greatest challenge for the editor; determining unique value requires human judgement that AI cannot supply, therefore, the role of the editor has increased.

The Content Strategy Layer Becomes Non-Negotiable

AI content creation very quickly turns into a game of numbers. Producing many pieces of content without any type of strategic direction won’t create an audience or build credibility, but will only fill your calendar with completed tasks.

Developing a successful team means realizing that AI will take a stronger strategy than ever before. Each individual piece of newly created content must have a defined purpose or reason for existing, a defined audience, and a defined way to be measured.

The determination of what topic to write about, how to find interesting angles on the topic, how to solve the reader’s needs, and how to create a piece that adds value cannot be done without utilizing human reasoning.

If your team uses AI for the purpose of escaping difficult strategic issues, you may find that the quantity of content produced will go up; however, your total value of content will remain unchanged.

Writer Morale Shifts in Ways No One Talks About Openly 

The introduction of artificial intelligence as a first-draft writing tool has changed the perception human writers have towards their own work in an emotional way; team members typically don’t notice this until it’s too late.

A writer’s years of experience in perfecting the art can leave them feeling more like robots editing documents than actual artists creating original content.

The emotional engagement of the writer experiences a significant decline due to the fact that once the writer is not the first point of contact for judgment, creative risk-taking will cease to exist. They’re likely going to find their next job somewhere that provides them with total creative freedom.

If you want to keep your top talent, you need to recognize the impact of their contribution on the final product, assure them that they will maintain creative control, and reward them for their actual writing abilities, not how quickly they can edit an already written document.

SEO Performance Becomes Harder to Predict

Many teams mistakenly think that increasing the amount of content published on a site quickly results in better search engine results. The current search engines use complex algorithms to compute rankings, and content volume is no longer a successful way to improve rank.

While some companies create drafts from AI and edit them, the resulting content typically ends up being broad rather than offering detailed insights. Most content produced by AI repeats general information already found online and does not provide original ideas.

Current search engines are looking for content that provides more than just the basics, so they are rewarding content that provides answers to unique questions and that is backed by the author’s expertise, showing credibility.

Publishing modified AI drafts with no unique value will, in all likelihood, result in a drop in your ranking – today’s search engines do not view the quantity of articles on your website as being equal to the quality of content.

Feedback Loops Between Teams Start to Break Down 

Through typical collaboration, there is a productive outcome of developing mutual comprehension of the topics involved.

There is a reciprocal educational relationship between the parties: the author acquires subject matter knowledge, and the expert develops a capability to communicate a more straightforward version of their complex information.

While using AI to create a first draft may eliminate this collaborative learning loop, there is no longer any intellectual negotiation occurring that serves to refine both the information being produced and the team’s collective knowledge base as it pertains to content development.

Long-term dependence on AI has resulted in teams using the AI frameworks to create outputs without also developing the internal knowledge required to assess or enhance the outputs.

Successful teams actively maintain these human exchanges as investments in building shared knowledge, as opposed to viewing them as wasted efforts.

Final Thoughts

AI-generated drafts allow for quicker content creation but will require increased amounts of editing. The volume of content will increase, but maintaining the quality of content will necessitate a commitment from the content professional to invest time to maintain that quality.

Content professionals need to change their roles to meet the demands of a new, faster method of working.

Successful teams do not outsource all of their work. They recognize the limitations of AI and place a high value on the contribution of humans. They work quickly but are equally focused on producing high-quality output.

The first draft will be created by AI, but the expertise of your team will shape the final product.