Is an AI Article Writer More Efficient Than a Freelancer?

It’s a question that’s becoming more and more difficult to ignore as artificial intelligence technology continues to improve. While there will always be naysayers and old-schoolers, companies that want to get the most bang for their buck from their online content will likely turn to AI to write articles for them. 

These AI article writers, like Article Forge, can do much of what freelance writers can do at a fraction of the time and cost investment. 

This article discusses the following points:

• Purpose of freelance writers
• Benefits of an AI article writer like Article Forge
• Drawbacks of using freelance content writers
• Potential downsides of AI article writers
• What an AI article writer can do for a content manager

The purpose of freelance writers

Despite the drawbacks discussed below, there are good reasons that freelance content writers are as common as they are. They excel at producing common pieces of writing like blog posts and articles - simple and digestible pieces at around 1,000 words.

If your business’s content marketing strategy primarily relies on this kind of simple and purpose-built content, then freelancers are often a cheaper option than employing an in-house writing staff.

This is the kind of content that Article Forge is targeting as an AI writer: SEO-oriented articles and blog posts meant to draw a wide amount of traffic and lead that traffic naturally to the company’s offering.

Benefits of an AI article writer like Article Forge

AI writers, especially Article Forge, are revolutionizing this area of online content production in several ways:

Quick and easy

Article Forge can produce entire longform pieces in minutes at the touch of a button.

Set the topic of your article with the Keyword input, structure your discussion of the topic with Sub-keywords, set your article’s length, and the AI will deliver a fully formed piece of content a few minutes later. 

Now compare this process to that of a freelance writer. A freelancer will generally take around 4 hours to produce a normal ~1,000 word article or blog post. And that’s once they find a four hour gap in their calendar, which could be days. We’ve found that there is an average of 2 days’ turnaround time between when an article is requested and when it is delivered, and the actual time to publish tends to be significantly longer.

Using Article Forge instead of a freelance writer can save months worth of time over the course of a sustained content campaign.

They’re great for SEO purposes

AI writers like Article Forge are excellent at creating content that improves a site’s SEO authority. The keyword-input structure of Article Forge was designed to help it naturally understand focus and related keywords so it can write whole articles around them.

While humans must make a conscious effort to find and include relevant keywords, Article Forge content is automatically SEO-optimized. This is because its article writing AI uses the same deep learning frameworks to identify and write relevant content that Google’s AI uses to identify and rank content relevant to a search term. 

Weaknesses of freelance writers

Speed

Freelancers have traditionally been a go-to for quick, cheap content needs, but the arrival of AI content writers puts this tradition into a new perspective. As demonstrated above freelancers are far slower than AI writers, which also makes them more expensive.

Reliability 

Compared to AI writers, freelancers are also much less consistent. They’re human beings with lives outside of work, so they’re subject to unavoidable life circumstances inhibiting their work - illness, burnout, and even things like jury duty all become potential factors when hiring a human freelancer to man your content pipeline.

Cost

Freelance writers charge by the hour or per word, and the average cost per ~1,000 word article could range anywhere from $20 to $1,000. This can be difficult to scale if you are a small business. The cost of freelancer written articles can also prevent SEO managers from executing long-tail strategies because each individual piece of content would cost more than it could bring in.

Read more about the declining value of freelance writers.

Weaknesses of AI article writers

All that being said, AI writers like Article Forge are not without shortcomings of their own. For one, they are not as good at fact checking their content as humans are. Most AI content writers need to have a human editor to fact check its content.

Article Forge, however, has made great strides in this area and is able to write factually for the most part. It still isn’t perfect and can get confused, but it is continuously updated and improved by the development team. Read about Article Forge 3.0's advancements in accurate AI content generation.

A problem with AI content generators that Article Forge is currently working to solve is that they are unable to truly understand and implement a brand’s personality and strategy in the content they write. They can write natural sounding prose that flows very well, but they are not yet able to fully grasp subtleties like writing for a particular audience, or positioning their product in relation to others on the market.

Symbiosis between an AI writer and a content manager

The best way to counteract these weaknesses is by pairing up an AI content writer with a human content manager - a high level strategist who can set specific, meaningful goals for the AI writer to achieve. 

Article Forge’s AI can take on the brunt of the legwork in reaching those goals, automatically producing fully formed articles. A human content manager then decide to publish the content as is or refine, fact check, and contextualize that material before publishing.

Then, when the material itself is up to snuff, Article Forge can add further value by streamlining and automating the publishing process. With a built-in post scheduler, integrations with WordPress, and a functional API, Article Forge can round out the final stages of a content production pipeline with minimal input from humans and no wasted time.

With all this in mind, the answer to our question “Is an AI article writer more efficient than a freelancer?” - is a firm but qualified YES. While freelancers will (probably) always have their place, AI writers can do what they do much faster and much cheaper in most cases.