Let’s accept it. Freelance writers can be expensive, inconsistent, and tough to scale when you need a steady stream of content. On the flip side, AI tools like ChatGPT that charge premium rates may seem like a solution. But they also fall short in delivering quality content that’s truly optimized for SEO. Here’s why it’s time to rethink both for your 2025 content marketing strategy:

Generic Content That Lacks Depth

AI content tools often produce vague content with formulaic paragraphs. Industry insiders calls it AI Slop. These drafts fail to capture nuance or originality and frequently contain factual errors or hallucinations.

In 2025, Il Foglio, an Italian newspaper, ran an entire newspaper edition generated by AI, without human involvement. Sounds innovative, right?

Well, things got a mess. One article copied sections directly from The Atlantic without attribution or modification. Even more concerning, the AI fabricated facts and made factual errors.

Brand Voice Gets Washed Out

Tools like GPT can never understand your brand personality. They misrepresent tone, skip emotional connection, and struggle with empathetic phrasing. Every article will sound the same.

Even brands such as Nike, Apple, and Coca-Cola have struggled with AI content, failing to capture their recognizable voice. This hurts trust-building in the long-term.

Complexity of Prompts

Ever heard save time with AI? That’s not practical in writing, at least as of now. Most first outputs are vague.

To get usable output, you need to craft multiple prompt versions, test, refine, and iterate. This can take hours per article. Sometimes, you may end up asking yourself: why can’t I write my own if it takes this much effort?

Freelancers Can Be Inconsistent And Costly

Freelance writers often have many clients. That naturally leads to missed messages, late deliveries, inconsistency in quality, and even unavailability during peak periods. Plus, hiring per-word or per-project rates can get expensive fast for businesses. It isn’t even practical for long-term projects.

Lack of SEO Expertise From Freelancers

Even if you break your bank for a freelance writer, the SEO part is still missing. They don’t know how to optimize structure, keyword placement, meta descriptions, or H2 formatting. And let’s not forget the fact that business competitions are rising day-by-day and all these are key to blog ranking in 2025. Without modern SEO training, their output can underperform.

Quality Control Gaps Lead to Errors

Without centralized editorial oversight, ghostwritten blogs from freelancers can have uncorrected grammar mistakes, inconsistent tone, or even hidden plagiarism. All these, especially the last one, would make your brand trust and SEO rankings hit a rockbottom.

No Holistic Workflow Strategy

AI tools and freelance writers may do the job for you. But they don’t offer built-in workflows: like generating SEO score reports, readability metrics, plagiarism scans, or updates. That means more manual work and delays for you.

SEO Ranking is a Moving Target

Google’s helpful content algorithm now penalizes content written only for search like low-effort AI content or freelance filler. Without careful human editing and value-driven writing, your content may vanish from search engine visibility.

Ethical And Reputational Risks

AI tools may generate biased content that may hurt the feelings of a particular sect. This risks reputation damage and loss of trust, unless you have strong oversight.

Take the case of Amazon Rekognition, a facial recognition tool introduced by the company for law enforcement and businesses for identifying individuals in images. During the implementation, it has faced major criticism after studies (including one by Massachusetts Institute of Technology) revealed that the software struggled with accuracy, especially misidentifying women and people with darker skin at much higher rates than others.