Announcing EdifAI: Our GenAI Content Service
Some content marketers see AI content generation as an existential threat to their business or their job. We don’t. AI is a tool to help us be more productive and cost-effective.
Cost-effectiveness is something we’re hearing about from more prospects and clients. Everyone is trying to do more with less, which isn’t great for an agency that tells prospects, “We never win on price. Quality and results are our measures of success.”
AI has shown us a new, affordable way to provide high-quality content that’s both easier to produce and meets our incredibly high standards.
We call it EdifAI. It’s a marriage of AI tools and expert editorial. Have we broken the iron triangle of cost, scope, and speed? We think so and we’re incredibly excited to tell you about it.
The problem with AI content
Until ChatGPT was released in late 2022, the only options to save money on content were to produce content in-house or find cheaper freelancers, often in developing countries. Both these options are difficult to manage and risky for quality. When ChatGPT came out, it seemed like it was going to change everything. Even I wondered if it was the end of my profession.
But it turns out that—even a year later—ChatGPT, Bard, and every other AI-generation content service have a few key flaws:
Hallucinations (when AI just makes stuff up) and misinformation
Circular logic and nonsensical statements
Uncanny-valley-style writing that feels “off”
No sense of how to produce engaging writing that’s fun to read
Plagiarism and a carelessness about where information originated
It’s not funny—like, at all.
What generative AI (genAI) can do is incredible. It has limitless knowledge with near-real-time results in practically every domain of human knowledge. GenAI is great, until it isn’t.
AI just isn’t good enough for engaging, quality content marketing. A lot of people are perfectly happy with what GPT-4 and services like Content at Scale or Byword can produce. We’re not.
How AI helps us get out of our own way
Our standards are super high. So high, in fact, that they’ve gotten in the way of our own success. For our first couple years in business, we treated every project with equal importance. A simple top-of-funnel SEO blog received the same amount of effort (and cost) as a thought leadership piece. It made sense to us, but not our clients.
One of our clients said, “You’ve got to lower your standards. I don’t want to pay the same rates for a standard blog post as I do for an ebook.” They were right.
Rather than compromise on writing quality and engagement, we found a way to cut out the mental and financial costs of writing. We accelerated that client from two articles per week to one every day, with enough spare time to produce content for other clients.
It took a few months of experimenting to get the AI to produce content that sounded like a human wrote it. Within a few weeks, we had it producing content that was better than most of the freelance writers we’d paid over the past year. Then we had a revelation.
The magic is in the editorial, not the AI
When Ellis and I started Edify Content in 2020, I thought we were great writers worth earning a premium wage. That was certainly true, but AI has proven me slightly wrong. We are great writers, and we are great editors with great taste.
The articles we produce aren’t great because of our writing, but because we can edit. We can take a decent article and, through the magic of editing, turn it into a great article.
Every single AI article we produce has at least four rounds of editorial:
A baseline edit by the writer who generates the content
A technical edit by a technical reviewer (usually me)
A stylistic edit by an expert marketer (usually Ellis)
An objective edit by a third-party editing service, Editor Ninja
Our editorial process catches BS, jargon, misinformation, circular statements, and boring blather. This is pretty much the same process we used when we were editing human-generated content, except now we’re applying it to AI.
EdifAI: A fast, easy, and affordable generative AI content service
A few months and dozens of genAI articles later, we’re rolling out our new generative AI content service, EdifAI. (Get it? We’re at least as funny as an AI.) We’re taking everything we know about AI content generation, blending it with our expertise writing B2B content across a wide variety of technical topics, and applying our thorough editorial process.
EdifAI is cheap, fast, and easy. Did we just break the iron triangle? Yep, I think so.
No contracts, no kick-off meetings, no price negotiations. We’re keeping it as simple and smooth as possible. You pay for an article, agree to our terms, give us the info we need, and we start writing. Three days later, you get an article.
We’re keeping pricing as low as possible with an eye on sustainability. We pay for our AI services, we pay our writers, we pay affiliates, and we pay ourselves. Discounts will be available for loyal customers.
There are three “products” to choose from:
Short article: 600-950 words
Medium article: 950-1,250 words
Long article: 1,250-1,600 words
That’s it! We’re working on additional options, like a 15-minute call, illustration and graphic recommendations, additional editorial, and rounds of revision. We’re not quite ready to manage all that yet, but if you need that, just let us know and we’ll accommodate you.
Cattle content (EdifAI) vs. Pet content (Edify)
EdifAI is meant to help you quickly and easily publish what we call “cattle content,” which is SEO blog content meant to generate clicks and entice readers. It’s not meant to be in-depth or go into how your product works. Rather, it’s all about capitalizing on SEO click volume and difficulty.
If you need content that’s more bespoke and goal-driven (we call that “pet content”), you should reach out to us. EdifAI isn’t meant to convert anyone or speak deeply to who you are, what you do, etc. It’s AI-generated. AI can barely tell a joke, much less know about your potential customers and their pain points.
Edify Content is our premium service offering where we do key messaging, website copy, thought leadership, executive ghostwriting, and social media management. EdifAI content doesn’t do any of that—yet. We do have plans to roll out more B2B content AI options, but for now we’re sticking with the top-of-funnel SEO blog content.
Interested in getting started? Go buy an article and give it a whirl!
