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Using AI as a Free Blog Writer

Author Benjamin Denis
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Using AI as a Free Blog Writer

We saw in a previous chapter just how easy it was to produce blog posts using AI. Does this mean that AI can be used as a free blog writer? It is probably not what we would recommend. Not if you want to also produce high-quality, SEO-optimized content that ranks in Google. But let us go through the math and how it works out.

Cost of copywriting

In our eBook SEO Success for WordPress with a Two-Hours-a-Week Routine we say that you can write one thousand-word blog post in two hours. If you are writing blog posts yourself, that is not free – it is whatever your hourly cost is multiplied by the number of hours you spend writing. If you are outsourcing work to a professional copywriter, you can expect to pay between $250 to $800 per blog post in the US according to the AWAI (American Writers & Artists Institute) 2024 Copywriting Pricing Guide (which also has a great review of the state of the industry that takes into consideration SEO and AI).

AWAI’s 2024 Copywriting Pricing Guide
AWAI’s 2024 Copywriting Pricing Guide

The AWAI document reminds us that the cost of a copywriter is not the cost of producing a Word document, but a collaboration that is guided by the copywriter so that they can understand the marketing essentials of each client (product, clients, positioning, competitive advantage, etc.). It is often a collaboration that goes beyond the production of just one article and every new mission enriches the results.

Download SEO Success for WordPress with a Two-Hours-a-Week Routine

What are we calling free?

To replace the copywriter for free, we are expecting AI to do the copywriter’s job: respond to a brief and deliver a finished blog post. As with a human copywriter, you may need to spend time working on the brief, answering questions and commenting on the first draft. You may also need to spend time copying the blog post content from a Word document into WordPress.

As shown in our chapter Test driving AI writing generators for SEO, free tools exist for writing blog posts with AI. In our examples, the Google Gemini App and HubSpot AI Content Writer are completely free. There is a free version of Microsoft Copilot in Bing and ChatGPT also exists in a free version although this is not the same technology as ChatGPT Plus. On free versions of AI tools, you may hit delays or limits with relatively intensive use.

You may argue, though, that investing $20 – $40 per month for advanced apps with fewer limitations is small change compared to the cost of paying a copywriter for a blog post. Or even 2 hours of your time.

Is it worth the money?

Is free content produced by a free AI blog writer worth the price you pay for it. Certainly! But is it worth the price you would pay for a professional, human copywriter. Definitely not!

You can review the blog posts we produced in a previous chapter or test the solutions we have linked to above. Ask the tools to produce content in your native language on a subject that you know a lot about and I think that you will agree that the content is just not good enough. Marketer Bibi Raven invited on the SEO in 2024 podcast says that “a lot of language models are based on similar copy, and they overuse phrases that were already overused”. She won’t use it for long-form copy and still relies on human writers.

There is also a problem of hallucinations (or confabulations as Harvard Business Review called them) in content produced Generative AI. You must carefully fact-check content produced by AI because it quite happily makes things up. We spotted them in the text written about Bidart, for example, but we may not have noticed in a text generated for a town we knew nothing about. Types of hallucinations can include factual inaccuracies, invented quotations and logical inconsistencies. Hallucinating is not something you expect with most human copywriters. Using AI will give you more work.

This is going to be one of the bones of contention we have with using AI as a free blog writer. By using AI rather than a human, you are going to give yourself more work – learning to use AI tools and carefully checking content. It is not really free if it is giving you more work.

Is it bringing value to your SEO?

Free or low-cost writing means that you can increase the number of posts you publish and this must seem like a big advantage for SEO. More content means more keywords targeted, more internal netlinking and more chance of attracting links from other websites. Many people have already jumped on this bandwagon though and Google has had to deal with an exponential increase in low-quality, generic content published in scale on the web since before the launch of ChatGPT.

It seems easy to detect AI-generated content using commercially available technology and one would think that Google also has something equivalent to tools like GPTZero internally. Publicly Google says that it doesn’t penalize AI-content but low-quality content. They do, however, insist on the fact that websites publishing lots of low-quality content (whether that content is being written by humans or AI) will be considered as spam. Recent Helpful Content Updates and the March 2024 Core Update appeared to have hit AI-generated content severely.

For the future, Google added watermarking technology to their own AI-generation tools to make it even easier to identify AI-generated content and there are calls for other actors to do so.

Using content straight from AI writers without editing it is therefore almost certainly bringing no value to SEO and may even damage your ranking if you are considered a spammer.

To succeed in the future, more than ever you need to produce high-quality content to stand out and gain an advantage from Google. It may be easier to produce this type of content using experienced human copywriters, but AI may be used to make the production process more efficient and less expensive. But it will not be free.

By Benjamin Denis

CEO of SEOPress. 15 years of experience with WordPress. Founder of WP Admin UI & WP Cloudy plugins. Co-organizer of WordCamp Biarritz 2023 & WP BootCamp. WordPress Core Contributor.