I’ve spent much of the last few months, like most people in my industry (and like most people in any industry), trying to make sense of artificial intelligence tools that have the potential to upend or optimize how we work. ChatGPT is the best known, but there are others.

I think AI is a powerful tool. But when I asked one tool, Jasper AI, whether writers were going to be replaced by AI tools, it told me we would not be replaced.

While we might be thinking our robot overlords are being clever, here’s what I can learn from AI on this very topic. Some of the content below was actually assisted by Jasper AI (I also wanted to test my editors to see if they could tell the difference between my writing and a machine’s) and also reflects conversations with colleagues and clients.

1. AI tools don’t replace the real value that humans bring to content marketing. Writers excel at storytelling, understanding emotions and perspectives, and creating authentic and relatable content. AI tools may be able to mimic these qualities, but they lack the creativity and empathy that human writers possess.
   
   
2. Content marketing is not just about high-quality writing, it’s about communicating and empathizing about a problem, and then sharing human stories of how someone solved that problem.
   
   
3. Successful content requires strategic planning, research and identifying the right target audience. A human writer can use intuition and experience to make these decisions, while AI may be limited by data inputs and algorithms.
   
   
4. AI doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. There is a power in human experience told through story that is missing with AI. It may be capable of analyzing user behavior data, but it cannot truly empathize with the audience and build a human-to-human relationship.

I think there are lots of ways AI can optimize content successfully for SEO or higher open rates. I think AI and machine learning will be a great tool for the tactical aspects of content marketing. But the strategic value and human storytelling value aren’t yet being replaced.