A couple of years back, the Opinions page of The Guardian carried an article on Artificial Intelligence: whether AI would pose a threat to humans. The 500-words op-ed was written by a robot: GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. Fed with the instructions to "use around 500 words, keep it short and simple, and focus on why AI is no threat for humans", the robot came up with a heartwarming essay on why its species pose no threat to the humans.
The article (of course edited by human experts at The Guardian), sounds incredibly human and intelligent, with a 'personal' tone. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that generates "original" human-like text using machine learning. GPT-3 runs on a prompt fed to it by humans. The end results are at par with any human expert writer.
Do we need to be concerned? Or, as the robot incites, stop judging and take it with a liberal dust of salt and pepper?
AI in content creation
There is no denying that AI would define our lives, and dominate our world in the coming future. Today 50% of work tasks can be automated while almost 60% of work is facing some kind of automation. And the wave has hit the fortress of content writing as well - a formidable domain that belonged to humans, until now. Garner Inc. declared that 20% of business content will be automated. This means that AI will do one out of 5 business content, with a huge chunk of content spinners relying on AI for quick generation of content for business.
The question is how far will artificial intelligence invade content writing? How far can robots churn out content that's authentic and appeasing to human minds and emotions? In the Man v/s Machine Intelligence combat, how do human content and its AI counterpart weigh on a feasibility scale?
Here we shall take a look at both sides of the coin.
Why is AI in demand?
AI may not have replaced human content yet, as it still requires human guidance, supervision and editing. However, AI content comes with multiple benefits. It can in fact help content marketers to scale up the work to a great extent. AI tools like predictive analytics, generation algorithms and Natural Language Processing can help in efficient creation of content.
Here's a quick peek into the benefits of AI in content writing and content marketing.
Micro-targeting: AI can segregate the audience to smaller groups based on gender, age, interest, etc. to help you reach your readers better.
Efficient SEO: AI accelerates SEO optimization. It helps search engines to better comprehend concepts like relevance and context along with keyword density. So, while your customers search for a range of relevant keywords, your content stands higher chances of being found.
Quick content: AI helps in speedy content generation. Plug in some key search terms and tags in the content, and AI can collect data on those topics.
Automated emails: AI helps in generating quick and easy email content for businesses, business reports or any kind of statistical analysis.
Tracking results: Artificial Intelligence helps content marketeers understand user intent and also helps in analysing user data.
Predictive analytics: AI helps enhance your business competence through predictive analytics. Employ AI to understand the preferences and needs of the audience, along with improving overall search engine optimisation.
Chatbots: Communicate with your customers using AI powered tools like Uber chat bot, Facebook messenger, your customised chatbots, etc.
Customised automated news: You can stay connected with your readers using automated updates and news that are target-centric and capture the interest of your audience.
Challenges of using AI in content creation
While accelerating content creation for businesses in the quickest and easiest way, AI has its own glitches to pick on. For a first, AI hasn’t yet achieved that level of perfection or spontaneity as humans when it comes to creativity and clarity. The way a human brain can perceive a message, understand the requirements and curate a content is still not perfectly mastered by the robotic writers.
● AI isn’t very good at writing bigger contents. It can work well within a few paragraphs.
● Manual intervention is required for a final go through before rolling out the AI-created content.
● Unsupervised AI can’t work. AI content needs multiple testing to reach the right audience to bring in ROI for you. Hence it takes longer to train AI in the initial phase.
● AI creates very repetitive and robotic text that lack the human sensitivity.
● AI often doesn’t follow grammatical structure or the right language to highlight a specific sentiment. Though AI uses Natural Language Generation, an AI powered tool, yet it is capable of curating meaningless paragraphs.
Humans over bots: what are the chances?
Despite all the upsurge in AI, it boils down to plain fact that Artificial Intelligence can assist human brains in crafting content, not replacing it. AI-generated content might soon become a norm, but it will take longer to be a substitute to original human content. AI can boost sales, fuel brand’s content, accelerate marketing tactics, save time and money. However, it can’t replace the depth and value of a content that humans create.
AI can’t come up with astounding ideas that are intertwined and flow lucidly from human minds. It can just spit out the instructions. As the demand for creative jobs are on the rise it is good news to hear that it takes human minds and emotions to give content the life and the voice it needs. If automated, bulk-generation of repetitive content is what you look for, AI can be your Genie from the magic lamp. But it takes more than a well-designed program and a few buttons to create personalised and engaging content that converses with your customers.
Conclusion
In today's self-centric world, every customer needs and looks for personal conversations: content that seem to speak individually to her or him. To make your content come alive and connect with "real" people, you need real brains and minds behind those words! While AI will help in making the entire process of content generation swift and efficient, human writers will keep on writing, speaking the language of the masses out there and creating emotional, intelligent and soulful pieces of conversations.