Will AI become part of your editorial staff?

Opinions on AI vary widely. Some fear losing their jobs, while others are convinced Skynet is being born (for the Terminator fans among us 🤖). Add to that the rapid pace of new developments, and it can feel overwhelming.

At Zuiderlicht, we see clear advantages alongside the concerns. In fact, we use artificial intelligence daily in our work. Never as an end in itself or as a replacement for our creativity, and always in moderation. A small selection of tasks where AI supports us every day:

• Forgot how to write a regex for a secure password?
  Copilot helps us think along during coding.
• Need someone to take minutes?
  Krisp records our Teams calls and generates summaries.
• Want to check an English email for correct spelling?
  Grammarly has our back.
• Got a landscape image but need a portrait format?
  Photoshop’s AI Generative Fill fixes that in seconds.

We also put AI to work for our clients. Recently, we implemented an AI tool within a website CMS, saving the client a huge amount of work. The motivation? Accessibility requirements that organisations such as housing corporations, municipalities and government bodies must meet. In the digital world, this quickly brings us to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). These guidelines – which we apply regularly – cover both functional and language-related requirements.

For one of our clients, a housing corporation for whom we had developed a new brand and website, this meant hundreds of web texts needed rewriting. Thanks to our AI implementation and carefully crafted prompts, we were able to make a real difference. The tool checks whether texts meet the required B1 language level. From word choice and sentence structure to avoiding metaphors. This eliminates the need to hire an external accessibility specialist or free up in‑house editors and communicators.

Beyond accessible language, the AI tool also helped reinforce the brand’s voice. During the rebranding process, we developed a new tone of voice. But applying it across 400+ pages would have been nearly impossible by hand. That’s why the AI tool rewrites existing content using very specific prompts, keeping full control in human hands.

And while you’re at it, you can also ask the AI to apply SEO optimisation: improving structure, adding logical subheadings and lists, all while preserving semantic HTML. It ensures everything is perfectly prepared for the website launch!

Does AI make communication professionals and copywriters redundant?

The answer is no. But the nature of the work is shifting of course. This doesn’t just involve integrating AI tools into websites. Writing strong prompts is a skill in itself: the clearer and more complete your prompt, the better the result. And human review remains essential, because unexpected phrasing or missing details can still occur. Even when taking those quality checks into account, the time savings are significant.

For example: if rewriting a webpage manually takes one hour, but reviewing AI‑generated text takes just fifteen minutes, then a website with 400 pages you will save you 300 hours of editorial time!

Our experiences with AI-assisted editing have left us wanting more. We’re currently exploring ways to make things even easier for our clients. We’re developing a before/after view, allowing users to compare AI output with the original text and iterate until satisfied.

In short, AI gives both us and you superpowers, helping us work faster, more efficiently and – perhaps most importantly – better. That means more time for delivering top-quality work in other areas. But AI isn’t meant to take over everything. We use it where it adds real value, so we can spend more time on the work where our human expertise truly shines.

Because it should still be fun, after all!