I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts recently, when the hosts, who comment insightfully and amusingly on pop culture, social trends, and yes, celebrity gossip, were bemoaning our frictionless society.

I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts recently, when the hosts, who comment insightfully and amusingly on pop culture, social trends, and yes, celebrity gossip, were bemoaning our frictionless society.

In case your weary, overly-saturated brain has failed to register the term “friction”, originally gained purchase in the tech world, where the goal is to create products that provide users with a smooth, effortless experience. Think of the iPhone and Uber app as its embodiment. The word has since migrated into the broader culture — including branding. Where you’re likely to run into it is when ensuring your digital user experience is frictionless, i.e., hiccup-free, lest visitors encounter too many and jump ship before subscribing to your newsletter or contacting you via your website.

AI is brilliant at smoothing out the rough edges in content marketing. And like virtually everyone I know, I find ChatGPT to be incredibly useful for specific writing tasks: transcribing interviews, editing for length, creating spin-off angles, and more. I use it to create personas that build on the tone of voice we identified working with clients during the brand strategy phase. They remind me to inject the right keywords and brand values into their content. That said, I still write copy and longform content the old-fashioned way.

Sure, you can give ChatGPT a couple of bullet points and prompts, and it will spit out serviceable website copy or a coherent blog post or newsletter article that’s free from typos. For you, the task will be frictionless, and you can cross content marketing off your list for the year.

Your audience, however, won’t engage with your content because if it’s too perfect, they’ll just keep scrolling. Nothing will get them to stop and take another look. Consider this: The Hustle reports AI-generated eulogies are all the rage now. Would you rather listen to one composed by a loving friend or family member, however imperfectly written, or a slick, polished version pumped out by ChatGPT with all the heart and soul drained out of it?

“Like most people I know, I find ChatGPT to be incredibly useful for transcribing interviews, editing for length, creating spin-off angles and more. But I still write copy and longform content the old-fashioned way.”

Great creative content — the kind that’s a little weird, messy and off-kilter that people remember and talk about —is simply more effective. It’s the idiosyncrasies, deliberate breaking of grammatical rules, and writerly warts and moles that make it pop.

Those devices create the friction that cause your audience to pause, reflect and engage. In all memorable creative, it’s the je ne sais quoi that (so far) only human intelligence, creativity and thought can bring to a project that prompts that kind of reaction. Sometimes you can’t put your finger on exactly what that quality is. But you know it when you read it. Or see it. Or hear it. As podcast strategist Monique Bowley observed on LinkedIn, “it’s not always the smoothest voice or the slickest interview that sticks. “It’s when something happens that’s surprising or delightful or raw or weird or... just human.”

Likewise, American actor and voice actor, Hank Azaria, who voices many characters for The Simpsons, demonstrated in a text and audio piece for the New York Times, that because a voice is more than a sound in his view, AI can’t replicate the humanity in the characters’ voices and decisions he makes about how to express it. “I’d like to think that no matter how much an A.I. version of Moe or Snake or Chief Wiggum will sound like my voice…the ‘humanness’ will still be missing.”

For sure, part of content marketing’s job is to fulfill SEO requirements and meet the cadence benchmarks set by social algorithms. In that respect, AI is a wondrous vehicle for amplifying your content generation activities, and equally beneficial at other stages of the process. I use it to help generate more content more quickly, which boosts the authority ranking, and discover variations on a particular theme, which helps me write multiple articles on a similar topic. But at the conception and writing phases, a generative AI chatbot, no matter how well-trained, can’t completely replace a creative, knowledgeable human being.

“In all memorable creative, it’s the je ne sais quoi that (so far) only human intelligence, creativity and thought can bring to a project that create the friction that will cause your audience to pause, reflect and engage with it.”

Your content is a reflection of your brand values and voice, and as such, it needs to have a point of view. Also, while generative AI is great for aggregating ideas and mimicking voice, it can’t create ideas and voice in a vacuum. It needs direction. Specific, informed direction, and that has to come from a human being who knows what direction to give it. And let’s not forget that the goal of content marketing is to promote your brand as a thought leader in your space. But thought leadership, by definition, requires original thought, and the one thing AI can’t do - at least not yet - is think original thoughts.

If you do the thinking, rather than outsourcing the task to ChatGPT, maybe you’ll make an unusual word choice, or play on words, or double entendre, or repeat certain words for emphasis or poetic resonance, and readers will take a moment to ponder your sly joke or double meaning.

One important lesson I learned writing radio ads back in the day is that a lyrical form of writing that relies on strategic repetition can be highly effective in marketing communications. But if you rely too heavily on ChatGPT, it will edit that kind of repetition out. It will constantly try to smooth out unusual constructions and word choices and correct intentional repetitions or plays on words because it will view them as flawed, unnecessary or redundant, and redundancy is considered the enemy of good writing.

Except, that is, when it’s used judiciously, and with an ear for the language. Then, your singular choices and intentional repetitions will lend your content nuance, and while ChatGPT does prompt you to make a judgement, it doesn’t do nuance. To achieve it, you have to know what the rules are, and when to follow or break them.

Which is why ChatGPT has forced me to add an entirely new step to my writing process, which is to edit my proofreader. Of course, I run all my content through it before I publish. I consider it the responsible thing to do: we can all miss a typo or glaring error. But in my grammar editor’s determination to streamline everything and ensure my writing adheres to the rules, the algorithm invariably removes all of my deliberate repetitions and idiosyncrasies that make my voice mine. (And as a brand ghostwriter, my clients’ voices.)

“I learned writing radio ads that a lyrical form of writing that relies on strategic repetition can be highly effective in marketing communications. But if you rely too heavily on ChatGPT, it will edit that kind of repetition out.”

For instance, I know it’s considered a no-no to use the passive voice. In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell advised never to use it where you can use the active. In On Writing, Stephen King put it more colourfully: “Timid writers like passive verbs for the same reason that timid lovers like passive partners. The passive voice is safe.”

However, if you know what you’re doing and have a well-trained ear for the sound and rhythm of a sentence, depending on the preceding and succeeding sentences, it might make sense to include one in the passive voice now and then to slow the pacing. Depending on your brand voice, particularly if it’s more educational and thoughtful, a passive sentence could very much be entirely on brand.

Interestingly, the more friction AI tries to remove, the more robotic it becomes. In an effort to sound more ‘human’, ChatGPT leverages devices like the em-dash. As The Globe and Mail observed recently, “while writers have long turned to [it] for dramatic flair or lively interruption, generative AI has taken that impulse and run with it − often in every other sentence.”

I’ve long been a fan of the em-dash, much to the chagrin of our design team, since it can look visually jarring and overusing it can disrupt the flow of text. But as a writer, that’s precisely why I like it, because it prompts readers to pause, breathe and take a beat to reflect on the message I’ve carefully crafted.

Now the algorithm’s over-reliance on the em-dash to convey the impression that a human being wrote the content has become so ubiquitous, it’s become a red flag for most readers.

“I’ve long been a fan of the em-dash because it prompts readers to pause and reflect on my carefully-crafted message. But ChatGPT’s algorithm uses it so profusely to convey a human wrote the content, it’s become a tell that ChatGPT wrote it.”

Although it’s tempting to use AI to speed up and remove the friction from the content generation process, at the end of the day, it’s important not to forget that standing out is still an art form. It involves creativity and craft and knowledge and skill and a writerly ear and decisions about what to keep and what to cut, all of which depend on a human being making informed choices. If you haven’t injected any individuality or personality or cleverness or humour or whatever tone is appropriate for your brand into the mix, why would anyone notice or care about your content?

Generic AI-generated content that looks and sounds like everyone else’s will only result in yours blending into a sea of sameness. It’s the difference between looking at a home where the furnishings and art reflect the personality of the owner, and one where stagers have deliberately moved in bland furniture and accessories, like the kind you might see in a model suite, so potential buyers can project their personalities and design preferences onto a blank screen.

And so, while AI can be a fantastic tool at speeding up and smoothing out various stages of the content marketing process, remember that it’s the vital pauses and nuances and maybe even a few imperfections that will lend your content the magical quality that will make it truly effective.

Because it’s those friction points that will prompt audience connection and conversion and all that other good stuff everyone wants. ■