Machines and computers are slowly taking over our daily work. And soon, we may no longer have jobs to apply to.
While this may be true in the near future, there are jobs that machines simply can’t take over. Jobs that require manual labour, like construction and delivery, are easy for machines to do. But jobs that require a lot of creativity and “human” touch are jobs that machines will have a hard time with.
Painters, doctors, lawyers, and reporters, rejoice. Your jobs are secured.
But, how about writers? Are we safe? Or is writing doomed to go to the mechanical arms of the robots?
Currently, machines are trying to take over the writing profession (especially in the digital marketing landscape) through “spinbots”— a menacing online tool that “spin” articles at almost lightning speed.
But is it worth it? Let’s see below if getting a spinbot is better than hiring a human writer.
Typing Speed
When it comes to typing speed, spinbots got the upper hand. A spinbot can spin an article fed to it in a matter of seconds. So you can easily spin one article into 5 different articles in a matter of minutes. While a human writer will take longer to spin the article properly.
But while a spinbot can spin an article, it can’t write an article of its own. So unless you have an article already prepared, a spinbot becomes useless when compared to a human writer. This might change in the future because of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in computers, but that’s still going to take a while before it becomes available in the market.
Spinbot: 1 – Human writer: 0
Accuracy
When it comes to accuracy, human writers have a huge advantage against spinbots. Human writers can easily grasp the topic and write about it accurately. While spinbots will only rely on the article fed to them, and spin it without thinking if the words and phrases it is changing is appropriate or not.
Often times, when a spinbot is used to spin an article, the essence of the topic disappears because the computer changed a crucial phrase or information during the spinning process. So the article no longer “sounds right” after being spun by a spinbot. This means there’s still a need for a human writer to check the article or risk your brand’s credibility with inaccurate articles being posted on your website.
Spinbot: 1 – Human writer: 1
Soundness
Just like accuracy, human writers also have an advantage over spinbots when it comes to making a well-readable article.
When you run an article through a spinbot application or program, the spinbot rewords some phrases and moves some of the sentences so it does not look too similar to the original article. This would probably be the same tactic human writers would do when spinning an article (this is perhaps the most basic technique of article spinning.) The problem, however, is in the word usage.
When you read an article that went through a spinbot program, most of the time you will notice the spinbot used unusual words that are considered “archaic” or words hardly used in modern conversational language. Because of this, the quality of the article diminishes and ends up being hard to understand. Sentence construction is also a big problem for some low-quality spinbot programs, making it highly unreliable if you want to have quality content on your website.
Spinbot : 1 – Human writer: 2
Credibility
Last but not the least: Credibility.
When it comes to credibility, humans are still better than spinbots. This is because spinbots are limited to what information they have in the article given to them, so they can’t add or subtract anything from the article to make it unique on its own.
This is where a human writer really shines. Because he is capable of doing his own research and can understand the subject matter properly, a human writer can easily add, subtract, and change the article to make it more unique and not just a copy-paste version of the original article.
A human writer will be able to spin the article by adding more information that the original article failed to mention and make the second article unique in itself, but retaining the information from the original article. This will also help avoid getting flagged with duplicate content by Google’s crawlbots and save you from a warning from Google.
Spinbot: 1 –Human writer: 3
And The Winner Is…
Based on our little analysis, it’s clear that having a human writer is still the best option if you’re looking for good quality articles. While spinbots can do the work faster, it’s still not reliable in many aspects of copywriting and could break your brand’s credibility. Unless it’s your only hope, it’s would still be favourable to hire a human writer to make articles for your website.
Writing blog articles is hard, especially if you don’t have copywriting or a writing background. So if you’re looking to give your site an article update, it would benefit you to hire a team of SEO specialists to help you with your articles and give your website a boost in the rankings.
