You're Not Sneaking AI-Generated Content Past Your Readers

You've been using AI-generated content for your website and social media. Cool, that must be saving you a heap of time, helping you attract more followers, grow your brand and increase sales, all without anyone noticing they are interacting with AI-generated content, right? Wrong.

Recent studies have shown that AI-generated content is detected by over 70% of people, and that's both images and text. Just over 90% of those who detect AI-generated content think less of the writer, or view a brand more negatively. Are you happy with those statistics?

Time to Rethink Your AI-Generated Content Usage?

Two different studies have results which should put all brands on notice. Consumers know when you are posting AI-generated content and they don't like it. 

Digital marketing consultant Joe Youngblood discovered that 71.63% of the time, US consumers could identify AI images when shown real photo images side by side. This study of just over 4000 people, suggested that not only are consumers likely to identify AI images, but that if these images were of a poor quality or bad fit with your brand, this is likely to reflect badly on your brand. They further suggested that AI-generated images could be seen as acceptable when the image is part of a meme, is a diagram or is an image which is not expected to be identified as being real.

Hookline& published a report based upon the results of their survey of 1000 Americans about AI-written content. They discovered that 82.1% of respondents can identify AI-written content at least some of the time, that experienced readers did not enjoy reading AI, and that brands can suffer reputational damage from customers knowing they are using AI writing. This research did show that consumers on the whole are ok with writers using AI to brainstorm, research, editing and analysing data. 

Moving Forward Using AI-Generated Content

Right, so where abouts does this leave you now in regards to using AI-generated images and text in social media and on your website? Well, the belief that AI can create all  content and this will benefit both the business and the consumer are wrong. Instead, these two studies demonstrate that using too much AI content turns off customers. When a business treats AI content as if they created it and expects customers to think it was original, you can expect a backlash to occur.

What you should be thinking about doing is:

• telling your audience when you are using AI content, each time!
• focus your efforts on creating your own unique genuine content which is seen as being more reliable
• use AI smartly for jobs like editing or researching, but use people for the content creation