Compare generative AI and human content creation. Patrick Danial reveals insights on how AI stacks up against human writers in quality and authenticity.
Generative AI has swiftly become popular among marketers and has the potential to grow to a $1.3 trillion industry in the next 10 years. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is just one growth example—rocketing to over 100 million users in just two months of its release.
Many have hailed generative AI as a process-changing tool that can quickly produce swaths of content with minimal human intervention, drastically scaling content production. That’s the claim anyway. But as AI becomes more prevalent, its use in content production opens several questions — does generative AI actually produce quality content? Can it match what human marketers can produce?
Prominent AI tools compared to human-led content creation.
Terakeet recently tested a set of popular generative AI tools — Jasper, Typeface, Writesonic, Copy.ai, and ChatGPT — to compare the quality of their performance to that of human content writers. This included outline and full article drafting, content quality testing, and measuring against Google’s helpful content guidelines. These tests revealed insights about generative AI’s current abilities in the following areas: content uniqueness, accuracy, accessibility, and related quality metrics.
Our methods involved supplying each AI tool and human content specialist with the same prompt and data. After the tools and human writers went head-to-head, the content went through a blind review by a team of content professionals. We also compared the results against Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines.
Human-generated content beat out AI-generated content in every category.
Though the AI tools had strengths in some areas, no one tool mastered multiple criteria across our tests. When it comes to accuracy, readability, and brand style and tone, the AI tools could not reach the level of quality that professional content writers provided. It also lacked the authenticity of human-written content.
AI is best used as a content production assistant.
Despite our findings, there are still numerous benefits to using AI to assist in content production. AI can:
- Offer assistance in source generation for writers to use in their content
- Provide support in article research and topic ideation
- Support writers’ ability to naturally use jargon to boost their credibility as experts
- Inspect content for style, readability, tone, and grammar with human supervision and review
- Identify factual claims and absolute statements for human fact-checking
Thoughtfully employing these tools and implementing AI governance strategies allows brands to guardrail how content writers use these tools to maintain high quality and impact while saving time.
The lesson: Brands and marketers must keep humans at the center of content creation.
Unsurprisingly, AI is not the end-all-be-all solution for creating content that truly connects with human audiences.
Yes, AI is an efficient and capable tool that marketers can leverage to supercharge specific content tasks. Using AI for tasks such as research, keyword analysis, brainstorming, and headline generation may save content creators money, time, and effort.
Even so, marketers should prioritize humanity in their writing. AI can only give us an aggregate of the staid writing available across the internet. But highly skilled human writers are masters of contextualization, tapping into the subtleties of word choice and tone to customize writing to specific audiences.
As some have pointed out, quantity can never win out over quality.
In the race to adopt AI tools, we must remember what makes content valuable and why it connects with human audiences. The online marketing landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, and brands can’t risk the ability to build trusting connections with consumers in their rush to streamline workflows. Ultimately, humans must remain the central focus as brands invest in unique and authentic content that connects.
Explore AITechPark for top AI, IoT, Cybersecurity advancements, And amplify your reach through guest posts and link collaboration.