Why AI Doesn’t Scare Me
As a business coach, I want to be viewed as a thought leader, as someone who can be trusted as an expert in the areas of small business finance and entrepreneurship. This is why it is important to be that I continue to produce content for my audience that is both engaging and informative. As a creative-minded person, this task can be fun for me! But on the days where the brain fog is a bit dense, or I’m feeling overwhelmed by other responsibilities, I can find myself searching the corners of the web for inspiration on the type of content I should be creating.
I spend a good part of the afternoon today looking at the websites, blogs, and profiles of other business coaches, most of whom I came across through random Google searches. I consider it a work of due diligence to see what other coaches and consultants are up to, and to see the kind of content that people engage with. What I found this afternoon led me down an AI rabbit hole that has left me feeling cautiously empowered.
I made a list for myself of eight different coaches and consulting companies, all of whom my business aligns with in some way, and I did a shallow dive into the content on their websites. What I quickly discovered was that these websites seemed to be following a standard outline. While it makes sense that similar businesses would share similar marketing techniques, the commonalities didn’t end at the outline. In fact, many of the blog posts and how-to guides, including their free downloadable content, shared undertones of vaguity, the kind of vaguity that seems to come from bot-generated writing.
While I personally haven’t dabbled much with AI generated writing, I decided that I would give it a try since it appears to be a tool that is proving valuable in the industry I’m in. I scanned through my list of potential blog topics, and picked a few that I’ve been intending to write, but just haven’t gotten around to yet.
To my pleasant surprise, after a simple prompt and a few quick clicks, I was left with a well-written article outlining the steps to starting your own small business. And after reading through it, I found that it was accurate, thorough, and way more concise than anything I would have written myself. But there was still something about it that felt empty, and I just couldn’t bring myself to post it as my own.
Whether or not those other coaches and consultants were in fact using AI to generate their content, the similarities between them all were unmistakable. What this tells me is that there are certain standards in every industry, certain topics or categories that are covered in some form or another by all legitimate businesses in a certain niche, and if you intend to compete in that market, you should probably follow suit and pay mind to those topics.
There was a moment today where I did feel a bit of concern that I wasn’t going to be able to keep up in this new internet world we live in, where content is being churned out in heaps during every second of every day. It feels a bit daunting to think about it like that.
But what I took away from this exercise wasn’t existential dread and hopelessness, but it actually inspired me to continue doing what I do, and creating content that is uniquely mine. After giving the bot a few more prompts to play with, and having it churn out more articles, I realized that it seems to be very good at being average, much better at it than I am. Afterall, it learns from the massive amount of content already out on the internet, and the objective seems to be SEO and keyword optimization, so it makes sense that it would be striving toward the peak of the bell curve. Lucky for me though, I enjoy being an outlier. I’m perfectly content residing on the tail end of the distribution.
As with all tools, AI has its strengths and weaknesses. There is certainly a place for it in business, and if it can help you write a great product description, or generate a logo, or even draft a business plan, then it is a tool that certainly should be explored. Just don’t forget to stay true to your brand and true to yourself in the process.
