Was SEO Content Ever Good? JH Scherck on the AI Slop Debate

**Ross Hudgens** (0:10)
JH, we had a breakfast this morning, talking B2B content. There is a specific through line in there that I think is worth leading with. What was that through line that came top of mind for you?

**JH Scherck** (0:22)
Well, I think I had kind of a different approach to AI and content than a lot of people at the breakfast. A lot of people said, like, we might be using it a little bit, we aren't using it at all, we really prioritize human writing, and I think we've spent a lot of time over the last year and a half experimenting with AI content, producing AI content, publishing it, tracking it, and I'd say for getting 85 percent of the way there, I think AI with the right context and the right execution does a better job than most humans in the content marketing field today.
It's that last 10, 15 percent of getting across the finish line that I don't think AI can do or not do well, and I think that requires a human to take that over. But for getting it most of the way there, just before the final mile, I think that AI is doing a better job than most people that are producing content by hand today.

**Ross Hudgens** (1:17)
I don't know if you're comfortable sharing the story you gave of some client situation that comes top of mind for me.

**JH Scherck** (1:24)
Yeah, I think whenever we get feedback on a piece of content that we send over for client review, and let's say there's some pretty strong feedback of like, hey, we don't want to frame it this way, or this seems off, or this seems like AI speak. When we go and we look at the edits in the post history, a lot of the times those edits are made by people and not AI. And I think that people have this very... When you're editing a piece of content from a human, it's like, okay, a human did this, I have empathy for them, they're working with me, I don't want to demotivate them.
When they know that AI is not just like... Even if they know humans have edited it, when they know that AI is sort of the starting point, all of that like empathy and care kind of goes out the window and they just have like very strong feedback. And I think they're almost in some cases overly critical. And it's because there's just a lack of trust of AI or people think it's inherently not good. But when we use AI, we have several layers of human review, and we find that oftentimes it's edits that people make that get the strongest feedback. And when it comes to things like research, brand guideline adherence, pulling information from whether it's like GONG calls or webinars, fact-checking, AI does a really good job of that.
Not just like a one-shot with cloud, but like an agent team with deterministic checks for like, does the code samples in the article work? Are the links that are going to, do they all function? Are they pointing to the right thing? Are the products described accurately? AI does a phenomenal job of figuring that out and checking that information. More so than like, I think a human can put in time to do it. Like if you were to go through all the steps that AI is doing and have a human do that, it would be very unprofitable. Now, I think the real issue is like the through line and the narrative and does every section have a job to be done because like it is still probabilistic and guessing. It doesn't actually know if this is high quality content, but it can deterministically figure out like, do I adhere to brand guidelines? Am I saying the right things? Am I getting this accurately? And with very technical products, like having a freelance writer produce that content, they're not always going to understand the product as well as say like AI could, especially like a developer tool product or an open source product that it actually can like write all the code for pretty much perfectly. So I think that getting the article 80 or 90% of the way there with the right inputs and human oversight is honestly like a more efficient way and oftentimes like a more guideline adherent way to producing content. Now there still needs to be that unique angle and that comes from a human typically.
And I think making it unique and making it stand out, that's something that AI really hasn't figured out. But in terms of like getting the nuts and bolts in the outline there that a human can then polish up, I think AI is doing a pretty damn good job of getting us 85, 90% of the way there. Now that final mile, that's the most exhausting part. So if you're editing that final mile, that's a lot of mental bandwidth. And I think like it is kind of draining to go through it.