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Freelance writer Theo Green considers the promise and pitfalls of using AI to generate content, and maps out the path forward
As the digital media landscape continues to evolve rapidly, artificial intelligence has emerged as a transformative force in content creation. From generating short stories and poetry to producing cinema-quality videos, AI tools are transforming how content is conceived, created, and viewed.
However, as is bound to happen with any technological advancement, the integration of AI into the creative process brings challenges as well as opportunities.
The rise of AI in content creation
The integration of AI into content creation has been rapid and extensive. Tools like Jasper.ai and Copy.ai have become valuable resources for business professionals, students, and creative writers. Platforms like these use machine learning algorithms that analyse vast datasets of published content, enabling them to generate content in a range of tones and styles, depending on how the AI user directs it.
Google’s recent unveiling of “Flow” at the I/O 2025 conference marks a significant milestone in the creation of visual content. This AI-powered video tool allows users to create short, 8-second video clips using text or image prompts.
Flow integrates Google’s latest advanced AI models, such as Veo 3 and Imagen 4, both of which are AI systems designed to analyse and edit images and videos. It offers enhanced video and audio generation capabilities, creating highly realistic video from prompts (instructions to the AI) that can be written in everyday language. This is quite an upgrade on what was available only a few months previously, and marks the rapid progress of AI models, which are becoming useful even to ordinary people in their day-to-day lives.
AI’s influence extends to small businesses. A survey by the US Chamber of Commerce revealed that nearly all small businesses (98%) are using AI-enabled tools, with 40% employing generative AI tools for powering chatbots and creating images. These tools help save on personnel costs and increase operational efficiency. Businesses are also using AI to solve problems that they would have had to outsource to specialists prior to the availability of modern AI programs.
Advantages of AI-driven content creation
The rapid uptake of generative AI by businesses is a strong indication of the utility of these tools. But how are businesses benefiting?
Efficiency, speed and safety
AI tools can rapidly generate content, significantly reducing the time and cost of drafting and editing. This acceleration is particularly beneficial for businesses needing to produce large volumes of content regularly, such as advertisers on search engines.
However, for businesses wishing to create more complex content, such as product descriptions and thought leadership articles, the use of AI should perhaps be limited to help with planning articles, as both accuracy and reader engagement will benefit from the human touch.
As well as saving time, AI can also reduce the requirement to employ freelance content creators at busy times. This has the further benefit of meaning that outsiders don’t have access to a business’s systems and commercial information, meaning that these can remain secure.
AI systems can also be run in the background with the need for constant monitoring, which frees up people to work on other things. Multiple AI systems can work on several problems at once, furthering the amount of work that can be done simultaneously and increasing work output massively
Consistency and quality
By adhering to predefined guidelines and styles, AI ensures consistent tone and quality across content pieces, maintaining brand voice and standards. AI can even be used to write code, though it does make mistakes when asked to code large projects, but can be utilised to produce smaller sections of code fairly correctly.
In late 2024, Coca‑Cola rolled out a Christmas ad campaign that leaned heavily on AI, with the visuals crafted significantly by artificial intelligence. These ads were tailored to individual markets, such as swapping out city names on road signs, to create a localised feel. While some viewers pointed out odd or surreal visual quirks, the company stood by the campaign, highlighting AI’s ability to produce customised ads at speed and scale. Coca‑Cola noted this approach aligns with its push toward digital-first advertising, which now accounts for roughly 60% of its media investments.
Despite the power of AI that this campaign demonstrated, it’s essential to acknowledge that a human will still be required to double-check what is produced by the AI, as its work is not always entirely reliable.
Enhanced creativity
AI can assist in brainstorming ideas and suggesting topics to write about or images to use. Even the most creative individuals can burn out, but utilising AI can help mitigate or delay this from happening, ensuring a more effective process.
It can also gather information and ideas from many more sources than a human could in the same amount of time. This approach enables the inclusion of diverse perspectives and experiences in creative development. However, it will not always be particularly effective at sifting through these ideas to find the most applicable options as it doesn’t possess judgment in the same way that humans do.
Creating quality content
Despite its advantages, AI in content creation is not without its challenges. These are wide-ranging, and some of the main issues are as follows:
Quality and originality
AI-generated content often struggles with originality, leading to repetitive or derivative material. The absence of genuine creativity limits the degree to which AI-generated pieces are engaging. And if content looks as though it has been created by an AI, this will probably reduce its credibility in the eyes of much of the audience.
AI-powered tools can often make mistakes (“hallucinations”), which can range from the humorous to the potentially dangerous. AI content creation depends heavily on data quality. Poor-quality data leads to inaccurate or misleading content. Human oversight is vital to prevent this. This can involve fact-checking processes or the validation of outputs against ethical and legal frameworks, or simply the application of common sense. A cynical mindset, though, will always be helpful: AI-generated content can appear to be very credible.
Legal issues
AI-generated content poses significant plagiarism risks. Algorithms can inadvertently copy phrases or ideas from existing works, leading to potential legal consequences. This serious risk can be mitigated by using a plagiarism checker to identify content that appears to have been lifted from other sources: when this is found, either an acknowledgement can be given or the text can be rewritten.
These issues of plagiarism are separate from the current wrangles in the UK about the use of copyrighted content for training AI systems. The law may come down on the side of copyright owners in their fight to prevent AI systems from using their content for training. In that case, any business that uses an illegitimately trained AI tool may well find itself in trouble.
Lack of emotional intelligence
AI lacks emotional intelligence and the ability to understand nuanced human emotions and sentiments. This limitation affects the quality of the content that can be produced, especially in areas requiring empathy and emotional depth, such as creative writing, marketing and human sciences. Having a human add their own experiences or opinions can be helpful here.
Integrating AI into content creation
To harness the benefits of AI while mitigating its drawbacks, consider the following best practices.
The future landscape
As AI continues to evolve and expand in the coming years, its role in content creation will likely expand, offering even more sophisticated tools and capabilities and opening new doors in terms of creation and ways to create things.
However, the human elements of writing and creation, such as creativity, empathy, and ethical judgment, remain irreplaceable and cannot be effectively reproduced by AI at its current level of complexity.
The most effective content strategies will therefore be those that blend the efficiency of AI with the nuanced understanding of human creators. Using AI in this way will not only save vast amounts of time in producing content. It will enable the creation of content that is both effective and engaging.
Theo Green is a freelance writer. This article was planned in part using ChatGPT and DeepSeek AIs, but was written by a human
Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and NanoStockk
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