The Pros and Cons of
AI Assisted Content Creation

I was given 30 minutes to write a thought leadership piece for Champion AI's Brains & Bots and it made me think about how the world of content creation has changed so much. It's clear that the assumption is that I will and should use AI to generate this copy. I'm going to treat this as an exercise to see what I can accomplish in 30 minutes without the aid of AI, and I'll use this half hour to reflect on some pros and cons of AI assisted content creation.

But first, a brief history of my time budgets for writing blog posts.

From around 2008 to 2012, I was freelance writing, mostly in the real estate industry for agents and new home builders. Eventually, I ended up in a position writing blog content and the expectation was to write one blog post a day. So roughly 15 years ago, I had eight hours to write a blog post.

Fast forward to 2024, I was working in marketing and research ops for a business intelligence firm, and we used a custom GPT to cut their four-hour blog post writing process down to one hour. The company's goal was to write one blog post a week, so the new process saved about 12 hours a month.

Here we are in 2026 with my half-hour budget, and I'm already 10 minutes into it. Budgeted time for this type of work has gradually been reduced due to advanced technological aid. I could spend 30 minutes thinking about a title, I'd spend another 30 minutes editing, then another 30 on another round of editing. I'm kind of enjoying the rushed aspect so far though, and if this piece is approved, I'll use my bi-weekly posts for these 30-minute writing sprints on a variety of topics. When you find typos or awkward phrasing, forgive me. Anyway, onto the pros and cons.

What are the pros of using AI to assist with content creation?

The main pro that stands out to me is variety. I may only have 30 minutes, but there are also three other people on the Champion AI team with 30 minutes to write a blog post, and they are experts in their fields. Instead of me spending two hours on a blog post, you get four pieces on different topics. If I was tasked with writing a blog post about something more technical, like Mohit, our AI & Automation Solutions Developer, I'd have to rely much more on AI, whereas he can use AI to assist his writing, and he understands when it's wrong and how to make the content better. I would have a more difficult time understanding why an output was bad for a more technical topic.

Another pro is augmented ability. Some experts in their fields have never written blog content before and now they can. Perhaps they simply don't enjoy writing but still need to communicate their thoughts in a clear and meaningful way. Now they can and the AI output might be much better than their writing ever would be, even with years of practice.

What are the cons?

I'm a firm believer that I need to practice a thing that I want to be good at; controversial, I know. If I want to be good at writing or remain decent at it, I need to do it. To me, this is good friction. If I used AI to write this, I would remove this necessary struggle and I might see my writing skills erode over time.

I also believe it is difficult to optimize passions (not that I'm particularly passionate about writing, but some people are). If something pulls you in for critical engagement and demands your time and energy, my intuition says the optimization of it should increase the amount of time you spend on it, not decrease it (speaking of time, I'm at 20 minutes now). I realize I'm spending 30 minutes on this post no matter what, but the time spent writing is much greater than if I were to use AI.

Finally, I prefer to decide what I say, not what Claude or another large language model (LLM) decides to say based on whatever my prompt is. I know I'm still ultimately deciding when using an LLM, but it feels indirect. I find it challenging to put my name on something that didn't come directly from me.

I'm at 25 minutes now, so I should wrap it up soon. My guess is I'm not going to hit my minimum word count, but I would rather say a little of my own words, than a lot of something else's. And I'm not disparaging others who use AI to generate marketing and blog content. As mentioned, there are pros to doing so.

Main takeaways:

• Not all friction is bad.
• Try to spend more time on your passions, not less.
• Have a solid understanding of your topic; AI outputs seem strong when you lack domain knowledge.

30 minutes on the dot.