Examples of the most egregiously awkward and tone-deaf writing that natural language processing (NLP) bots can produce make for effective clickbait, but they do not do a very good job of showing how artificial intelligence is and is not useful for writing website content for law firms and other kinds of businesses. The fact that bots can be creepier than Kafka does not tell you much about how well the bot can write understandable blog posts about car accident injury claims. A recent article by Robert Marshall describes the functions of a content writing software called ContentBot and its applications and limitations for writing various types of online content. Whether you decide to write your own legal blog content or entrust the task to bots or to professional human writers is your decision.
How ContentBot Works
ContentBot uses GPT-3 technology. GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer. Like other NLP software, it quickly reads a large corpus of texts and remixes them in order to generate the content you ask it to write. It has a feature where it can write an entire first draft of a blog post (or content page, FAQ page, or whatever other text you are asking it to write), as well as one where it can simply suggest titles and subheadings. Marshall shows a screenshot where you can ask ContentBot to draft content, rephrase existing content, or generate topics.
The Pros and Cons of ContentBot
According to Marshall, ContentBot is very effective at writing product descriptions and other texts that do not require subjective experience. He also recommends it for revising human-written content to make it more SEO friendly. He advises that, like other content-writing bots, ContentBot works better the more thoroughly you communicate with it. In other words, if your instructions are sufficiently detailed, ContentBot will rise to the challenge. Perhaps this is another way of saying that, no matter what, you have to do the thinking yourself, but some people find it helpful to communicate their thoughts to a bot instead of simply to themselves.
Since ContentBot uses GPT-3, its frame of reference only goes as recently as 2019. This means that, if you ask it to write about a pandemic, it will assume that you mean the bubonic plague, not COVID. Although Marshall does not directly address law firms, the time-limited corpus could be an obstacle for law firms, since new legislation and court decisions form an important part of blog content for law firms. By this logic, it is probably more useful for generating evergreen content and guest posts than it is for creating blog posts about recent developments in your practice area.
If You Can Communicate With Bots, You Can Communicate With Humans
The professional legal content writers at Law Blog Writers can use their up-to-date knowledge to compose readable, factually accurate blog content, with or without the help of natural language processing bots.