Despite only bursting into wide prominence in late 2022, AI tools have been around since the 1960s, with ELIZA – a chatbot that could interact with humans – setting the stage for the AI tools of today. Offering efficiency, creativity, scalability and the ability to take on an endless variety of tasks, AI’s role in content creation is expanding rapidly. Most businesses use AI to create content in some form or another, and even businesses such as banks and brokerage firms, which operate in the highly regulated sector of financial services, are leveraging AI to produce reports and engage with customers at scale.
However, as the presence of AI in the content creation space grows, debates continue raging about its limitations. Can AI ever completely replace human writers? Can it truly be creative? Can AI-generated content ever be completely trustworthy? Are there any ethical considerations to keep in mind when using AI tools? Understanding the rapidly evolving role of AI in content creation is important if you’re looking to derive optimal benefit for yourself or your business from its potential. Here are some of the key considerations to keep in mind when evaluating the role of AI in content creation.
1. Efficiency vs creativity
AI tools operate with impressive speed and can churn out reasonably well-written content, stunning visuals and impressive video content in a matter of minutes. In a business landscape where speed matters more now than it ever did, AI-powered tools often make the difference between a brand being able to put its message out before competitors or being relegated to second place.
However, AI models are limited by the datasets that they’ve been trained on and often churn out repetitive and straitjacketed writing. Storytelling, humour, and nuanced perspectives remain distinctly human traits, while AI tends to recycle commonly available data, often producing uninspiring content that lacks originality.
2. Maintaining brand voice and authenticity
Content plays a vital role in shaping a brand’s identity. Storytelling has always played a key role in audience engagement since whatever content a brand puts out ultimately gets read by humans – and humans love stories. AI-generated text, while efficient, often lacks a unique brand voice and a brand that relies heavily on AI for content creation risks sounding generic, which can alienate its audience. A human writer, on the other hand, can craft deeply personal and compelling stories around whatever theme a brand wishes to talk about, giving human storytelling a distinct edge. This is also true in the case of human involvement in customer service at businesses such as online retailers, where empathetic communication can make a large difference between retaining an aggrieved customer or losing them forever.
3. Risk of misinformation
AI tools are only as reliable as the data they are trained on. While they are trained from vast datasets, most AI tools themselves don’t possess the ability to fact-check or verify the accuracy of the information they share. In industries such as financial services or healthcare, where the accuracy of information is important, minor inaccuracies can get magnified, leading to business risks.
Businesses often try to ensure accuracy in content by investing in and deploying additional resources as an editorial layer for reviewing and validating AI-generated content to verify its factual correctness. Despite this, there remains the problem of reduced ownership of content quality on the part of the person generating the content as with AI-powered tools at the disposal of content creators, subject matter expertise is no longer a key requirement when it comes to creating content.
4. Ethical concerns and data bias
Since AI learns from existing data, it would likely inherit biases present in historical content. If not carefully monitored, AI-generated content can reinforce stereotypes or create biased narratives that can lead to exclusionary practices. Businesses must ensure that AI tools are trained on diverse, high-quality data to minimise ethical concerns. However, this is easier said than done, as most AI-powered tools draw on a finite universe of large language models (LLMs) with little to no say on the quality of data used in training these LLMs. Most businesses also would likely not have the resources to develop their proprietary LLMs or AI tools and thus run the risk of perpetuating the biases inherent to existing AI models.
The future: Human-AI collaboration
Only time will tell whether AI will one day truly be as creative as humans, but one thing to be certain of is that businesses that manage a setup of a hybrid approach to content generation will be best placed to reap the benefits of AI in content creation. AI can play an important role in brainstorming for content ideas, setting up content structures, and even putting together a first draft of content, while human writers can fact-check, make edits and lend depth and emotion to the final output.
Conclusion
The future of content creation does not seem to be one in which AI completely replaces human creativity but rather one in which it augments human potential. While human insight, emotion, originality and creativity remain irreplaceable, AI brings efficiency and scalability to the table. Only by integrating AI into operations while keeping human expertise at the forefront can businesses such as NBFCs and online marketplaces harness the potential that AI-powered content offers.
