Share and stay connected
Prompt
AI-Output (ChatGPT)
Human Edits
Author Insights
Share and stay connected
Company blog posts are, by established custom, hopelessly insipid. Dry, bland, boring. They tend to follow the example of reading materials extracted from dusty manila folders – insurance forms, dental records, rejected job applications at the Toothpick Quality-Control Office. You might find an interesting snippet every once-in-a-while, an informative line or two somewhere in the slog (“Rejected: Applicant edentulous since World Brick-Chewing Championship ’87”), but you’ll have to wade through an eye-glazing series of monotones and filler to discover anything worthwhile.
Why is that? What is it about corporate copy, even when it’s dressed up as a trendy how-to-guide or stylish listicle, that makes it so mind-numbing to get through? No, it’s probably not a conspiracy to hypnotize readers into clicking ‘Add to Cart’ in a consumerist knee-jerk against boredom. Nor a ploy by rogue orthodontists to test linguistic forms of Novocaine on the unsuspecting public. Both more reasonable guesses than they should be.
Our theory about business-blog dullness is simpler: nobody likes writing ‘em. And if the creative process behind a piece of writing is an act of drudgery, or even simply of duty, its final product will reflect that – reading the piece will feel equally like a drudge, or a duty.
That’s not to say there aren’t payrolled bloggers out there who take pride in their work and strive to make it something more than basically literate and grammatically inoffensive. Exceptions no doubt to every rule. Still, in most cases whatever ‘style’ or ‘personality’ happens to grace any post appended by a corporate signature reads as largely superficial, as though included only to meet the requirements of a job description. Many blog-copy gigs don’t even bother.
Problem is, many blog posts (and the majority of those commissioned by companies) aren’t intended primarily to entertain or even inform. Take a peek behind the curtain and it’s all just SEO. That’s “Search Engine Optimization”, for those lucky enough to have so far avoided exposure to the more acronym-oriented side of the writing industry: as long as a webpage has the right concentration and distribution of keywords to get as close as possible to the top of a search-engine query, SEO sez the words are doing mostly what they need to.
At that point, any informative/entertainment value for the human reader is almost accidental – the primary audience is a search engine algorithm. Yeah, higher quality writing will earn more clicks, but that’s rarely the primary focus of your average blogging gig. If the algorithm likes it, half of the views-battle is won, and most companies, ever enamored with efficiency, will leave it at that. The second half is harder, and more expensive.
VocaTales is a company. A registered Delaware C-Corp, no less. But we’re a company for creativity, and every one of us is a creative first and foremost. We aren’t fans of dry, bland, or boring.
As such, we’re committed to publishing content that people actually like to read – to a 100% slog-free blog policy. We want to have fun writing everything we write, and our most important directive to any person we engage to create content on our behalf – freelancer, web-specialist, consumer-hypnotist, or otherwise – will be that they have fun doing it. Because if it was fun to write, it’ll be fun to read, and the joy of creativity is the value we aspire to provide above all others to writers and readers alike. Same goes for other media: the more you enjoy making it, the more your audience will enjoy it too. And the audience we care about is made of human people, not computer programs.
Still – “to change the game, you have to play the game” (depending on the search engine you ask, that’s a paraphrase of either Einstein, J Cole, or one-or-another sports legend, all presumably championed by rival SEO brigades). Meaning, to make the impact we hope to, VocaTales still needs to impress Google and Bing and the like, however skeptical we may be about their critical eye and artistic discretion.
Luckily, we live in the future – we have machines to do the work that humans don’t want to. AI has arrived, and it too now can write stuff. So if we need to write in part for an audience of computers, might it be wise to enlist the help of – and don’t waste a drumroll, here – more computers?
For a company invested in human creativity, that question could have a few different answers, each begging a unique approach and distinct editorial tone:
- Self-Righteous Denial: “AI? Nuh-uh. No way. Have Smith from the Blogs-Department whip us up some of the good stuff, here’s the list of keywords. They’ll have to do some extra legwork but there’s no fighting the algo, and the readers come first! History will thank us.”
- Innocent Optimism: “AI? Huzzah! Tell Smith from Blogs they’re off the hook, more time to work on that novel. The computer can pick up the slack. Algos can entertain themselves now and readers will surely love it. Kowabunga!”
- Ambiguous Intellectual Cynicism: “AI, huh? Eh, maybe. No sense not to try it. If one cannot beat them, one must join them; feed the server some keywords. Get Smith to edit, check in on the algorithms and monitor the results. Ensure the review is impartial.”
But rarely is the ideal choice found at either extreme, or in the indifferent center. We think it’s best to act in everyone’s interests as much as possible, prioritizing those who need relief and then maximizing the happiness of all (in this humble case, that’d be blog-writers and blog-readers, respectively) and experimenting with new ideas/technologies in doing so.
So in that spirit of adventure and equity, VocaTales chooses option D: All of the Above – in addition to joyfully crafted, human-created stories, we’re pursuing people-oriented, AI-assisted blog content. To be totally clear, that doesn’t mean we’re replacing any human jobs with AI programs – we’re just making some of those jobs easier, hopefully more fun, and a little bit different. With the following goals:
- To allow our writers to fully prioritize the expression of their personal creativity and imagination, without ever chaining their thought-process to keywords.
- To publish only content that was produced joyfully, is engaging and informative to read, and is never a slog to get through.
- To transparently explore the differences between human and AI content, with the theory that, basically, the human stuff is better – so why not show the value that a human creative process brings to the table, and how it compares to the alternative?
In a nutshell, the plan is to take as much advantage as possible of Gen AI’s potential benefits to creative workers, without compromising the human imagination that makes reading and writing worthwhile in the first place.
A precarious tightrope to be walking. So how do we plan to pull it off? First, by sticking like nails in a rowboat on an ocean of superglue to our Human-First AI Principles. And more specifically, with our new Bionic Blog Format, designed for the joy of humans first, and the demands of computers and industry second – no matter the creative endeavor, the people it touches will always be our principal focus.