Whom are you writing for? Humans or machines

Today, the writing craft is facing a kind of machine pincer attack: AI tools dumb the writing to an extent it’s high on patterns, low on substance; and SEO gods that reward this very writing type and incentivize more of it. 

All along, I thought we were writing for humans.

I was recently awakened to the new god on the horizon: the machines (the SEO algorithm) that first reads your writing and determines its discoverability.

I was asked to break down the writing into ways the machine can understand. The headings, the subheadings, and then some related 𝗌̶𝗍̶𝗎̶𝖿̶𝖿̶ fluff. To tailor the content such that it’s easily interpretable to the machine.

What about humans? Oh, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Let’s first confine our vision to why patterns are so central to writing today.

Why is it that long paragraphs are an absolute no-go zone today? Why is our vocabulary confined to a few overused phrases and jargons? What’s the point of the language’s vast vocabulary if most of them are off-limits for daily use. Why is clever writing discouraged? Why is stale writing, which bores even the writer (let alone the reader), suggested?

Majorly, it happens because the platform/format shapes the user behavior and, therefore, the writing. Books allow for longer attention spans: that’s why they can get away with long sentences and clever writing. Social media platforms, in contrast, are designed to distract the reader and keep them running on a content treadmill. Therefore, there’s little scope for things not dumbed down.

But that’s not all. As David Samuels, literary editor of Tablet, notes:

“Platforms animated by machine logic turn people into functional subroutines, repeating chunks of language in response to prompts. By doing so, they help the machines to sort categories of information that are unique to human beings into machine-appropriate buckets.”

Today, the writing craft is facing a kind of machine pincer attack: AI tools dumb the writing to an extent it’s high on patterns, low on substance; and SEO gods reward this very writing type and incentivize more of it.

Samuels astutely observes:

“The auto-complete function that is now built into every platform from Google to X is merely one obvious way that machines are breaking down the individuating qualities of language into a more impoverished and grammatically rigid—that is to say, less human—language that they can more easily predict.”

These are just stray instances. Do they influence how writers write in a big way? Samuels thinks so.

“These activities, especially when repeated dozens of times per day, bind their authors, i.e., you, to larger machine-friendly language complexes that train their human users to uncritically accept judgments and prompts that are reinforced by the real-time networked effects of millions of other machine-mediated human users.”

It reminds me now: the old-fashioned way of writing an essay is totally out of sync with how you write on a social media platform.

In a world where the search engine’s algorithm determines your content’s discoverability, whom should you write for? Machines (the algorithm), or, the humans.

Therein lies the secret of an exaggerated focus on writing that machines, not humans, understand. A reader can only tread the path lit by the algorithm. Should the algorithm gods be unsated, they can push your content into oblivion.

You got the machine’s attention. Now what?

So you got what you were looking for: the machine’s attention. And the machine led humans towards your writing.

What about the human who eventually stumbles on our writing?

Here’s where the real question comes into play: did the reader find the content valuable?

So far, we were so occupied with connecting the reader to your writing that we lost sight of the last mile. That of providing readers something useful and valuable. Something that justifies the time they took to read your stuff. That respects the effort they took to find your writing.

Of what use is building the bridge when the destination doesn’t justify the time and efforts the construction took.

Let’s put humans back at the center of content marketing efforts.