AI technology now 'better at copywriting than humans'

Businesses are entering a new era for copywriting, where humans are no longer needed to write about mundane content, according to a new study, which claims a major milestone for AI technology has now been reached.

The study, by consumer insights technology specialist Spot Trender, found AI managed to fooled consumers – some audiences less so – and performed higher in several key areas including readability, being informative, and perceived as more natural.

Spot Trender tasked its marketers with writing two articles with the same outline prompts that were fed into the AI, creating a total of four articles. They were shown to a nationally representative example of over 500 people in random order, who were asked whether they thought the article shown was written by a human or an AI, was relevant, interesting, funny, easy to read, and informative among other things.

The results showed that the AI-generated articles outperformed those written by human authors on most metrics tested. One of the articles tested titled “Why Test Ads”, performed higher in being informative, easier to read, and perceived as written by a human, when in fact it was written by the AI. They also scored about the same as human-generated articles in interesting, funny, and relevant.

When asked if people could tell which article was written by a human or machine AI, most people chose human for both articles. One AI written article scored 10% higher in “written by a human” than its counterpart.

Regardless of age or gender, people were equally as bad at spotting the AI. Interestingly, those living in rural areas were more likely to be able to distinguish between human and AI-generated content; the report claims this was perhaps because they are more skeptical of technology in general based on their answers to the human articles.

Spot Trender co-founder and CEO Chris South said: “This research shows that as AI technology continues to evolve, it is becoming easier and easier to replicate the writing style of humans.

“In the not-too-distant future, it’s likely that most of the written content we see will be generated by machines except for some niche areas. After all, people in the study who thought they were smarter than their peers were no better at spotting AI, if not slightly worse”

Spot Trender co-founder and president Rick Nguyen added: “As a marketer, I’m excited about this development because it makes life easier for us. Moreover, we can add a lot more value to our team, while doing a lot less of the boring stuff, like readability analysis for SEO.”