Like many writers who take their craft seriously, I had an uneasy relationship with the word “content” for a long time.
Once, in the late 1990s or early 2000s, I went to a digital marketing conference and heard a man onstage — a real pioneer in the emerging field of digital content — say, “I’d like to find the person who coined the term ‘content’ and kick the living shit out of them!”
The crowd, composed of digital marketing pros (we’d later call them “content marketers”) cheered. He then went on to outline some strategies for generating income by utilizing internet content.
If he had a point other than a general annoyance at the term, I don’t recall what it was.
My unease stemmed from the sense that the word “content” seems to relegate our work to the role of filler, as if it’s merely some stuffing inside what really matters: a web page design, an email template, or an advertising campaign. Or, worse, as if it’s merely a lead magnet to bring “eyeballs” into your ecosystem so you can monetize them. [Translation: Something to entice people to visit your website so you can make money from them.]
In other words, it’s a digital version of the age-old artist’s aversion to commerce. I’m creating art here! This is Writing, with a capital W, dammit!
What does the word “content” really denote, though? If we look past my initial reaction, it’s clear that “content” has never been merely filler, even for ad-supported publications and marketing campaigns.
Content is the beating heart of any experience centered on words, voice, sounds, images, or video.
Content is what we go to a website, a magazine, or a concert for.
Content is what people are willing to pay for—with money, time, or both—in order to learn something, have an experience, make a connection, and feel like they’re part of something bigger.
When you open a book, the first few pages often include a “Table of Contents” that gives you a roadmap for what’s inside. No sane writer should feel insulted that their book has a table of contents, any more than they should be upset that their book contains numbered pages. What’s inside the book — its content — is what readers actually care about.
When we talk about “writing,” we’re putting the focus on what writers do. We produce words on a printed page, in a document, in a script, in the pages of a speech. The written words might be an intermediate state, as they are when lyrics are written down before being sung, or when a screenplay is written before being produced and filmed. But often the words are the end product, as they are when we’re writing a blog post, article, issue of a newsletter, or book.
Content and writing are just different words for the same thing:
- We say it’s content when we’re working from the point of view of a business person who is concerned with making money, somehow, from the words.
- We say it’s writing when we’re adopting the perspective of the people creating the words, who are concerned with crafting them well and connecting with readers.
Two sides, same coin.
So I have put aside my unease with the word. Content is what I produce when I am writing. My clients tell me I do it well, so I'm happy to call it content since that’s what they’re looking for.
Writing “backwards”
One of the reasons I’m pretty good at creating content is that my years of journalistic work taught me to adopt the audience’s perspective and to craft stories with that in mind.
That’s the point of view that really matters: The reader’s. If we can’t give them something they’re interested in, they won’t read what we’ve written. This is one of the immutable principles of good writing, or good content.
George Saunders describes his rewriting process from this perspective. He advises you to picture a meter on your forehead. As you read through each sentence, ask yourself: Is the needle tilting towards positive, interested, and engaged? Or is it moving towards negative, uninterested, and bored? If the needle is moving to the red, you need to revise your words until it moves into the green again.
My friend Gary calls this “writing backwards.” Instead of starting with what you want to say, you start with what the reader is interested in hearing.
So, instead of writing (the writer’s POV) or content (the business POV), I think we need more specific words when we’re taking the reader’s perspective. Readers are not looking for “content,” and they’re usually not looking for generic “writing.” They’re looking for something else: an entertaining novel, a reliable source of information, accurate news, or perhaps inspiration. Maybe they’re looking to stay connected with a community or to acquire new knowledge. They might be looking for a voice that sounds relatable or uplifting. They might want to read the latest work by a favorite author.
From the reader’s perspective, there’s always something specific they’re looking for. Getting clear about what that is is the first step to making effective content.
What changes with AI
With the advent of generative AI, we don’t necessarily need a writer to produce content anymore. We could have an AI do it, right?
In this case, I believe, writing and content are not the same thing. AI-produced content may look like writing, but nobody actually wrote it. It’s a pattern of words that the AI generated based on statistical probabilities of word and phrase relationships distilled from its analysis of billions of existing documents.
In some cases, those words look convincingly similar to human writing—good enough, in fact, that we might be able to use them as part of our own writing process. We might even use them directly as content by publishing them on a blog, in a newsletter, or on our LinkedIn.
This is where we need to be very careful. My experience with AI is that it’s easy for the sophistication of the content it creates to dazzle us, leading us to overlook its underlying weaknesses. And AI-generated content very often has weaknesses. I’m not talking about AI overusing em dashes—which I also do—but about more fundamental flaws: Predictable structure, weak arguments, mediocre and stereotyped phrases.
If you’re not prepared to edit AI content very thoroughly, those weaknesses can slip into the final product. Sometimes the work of editing requires an almost complete rewrite, at which point you might well ask yourself why you started with AI at all.
Content pros know this. In my recent 2025 survey of content professionals, I found that while 89% of content professionals are using AI in some aspects of their work, only 32% use it to create first drafts.
Instead, they’re using AI for copy editing (48%), doing research (46%), brainstorming (45%), creating outlines (40%), and generating headline possibilities (40%), among other tasks.
So in my view, AI can create content. Just don’t expect it to create good writing, because for that you need a human writer.
For now, at least.
Have you been using AI to create content? If so, what’s working well?
