Balancing AI and Authenticity in Content Creation

As AI transforms content marketing, brands must strike a balance between automation and maintaining authenticity. While AI boosts personalisation and efficiency, consumers continue to demand genuine and relatable content thus ensuring the human touch to ensure trust and maintain that consumer connection. 

How is AI perceived at the moment?

- In a recent survey, HubSpot, a CRM platform that offers marketing, sales and customer service software, found that 71% of the 1,000 marketeers they asked said that AI helped them personalise the experience that customers received from their company.

- Gartner, a US-based tech research and consulting firm, predicts that by next year, around 30% of outbound marketing messages will be AI generated. 

- Research by Nosto, the developers of Stackla, a cloud-based content marketing platform, found that despite 86% of consumers valuing authenticity 57% feel that less than half of brands deliver. 

- The ‘Brand Statistics 2024: Understanding the impact of branding’ report from Energy & Branding on LinkedIn noted that 81% of consumers needed to trust a brand before they bought from it.

So while the general belief among marketers is that AI can assist them in creating content, can that content be trusted?

Engagement is key

Yet another survey, this time by digital asset management company Bynder, revealed some very interesting findings to do with the way that people perceive AI-derived content and whether they can detect if a piece has been written by a human or AI. The company found that only 50% of consumers were able to detect AI-written copy and, more surprisingly, over half found it to be more engaging than human-written words. However, when people were made aware that they were reading AI-produced copy 52% of them felt less engaged. It’s almost as if they felt dismayed at being ‘duped’. 

The secret, as with human-produced copy, is to produce high-quality, engaging, and highly-targeted content that resonates with your audience and with which they can relate. Consider using data-driven insights into your audience such as their behaviour, preferences, and what trends they adopt to tailor content precisely for them. In this way, you’ll foster genuine and meaningful relationships which will build trust.

Authenticity adds value

With over 2,000 generative AI tools available today, some of them free, many marketers are questioning just how authentic the content they produce can be. Concerns are also being raised about exactly where AI content generators obtain the content that they train the algorithms on, and then reuse – debates surround the sources which include publicly-available information, websites, and databases but also, more controversially, from authors’ copyrighted works for which they receive no acknowledgment or compensation. 

Authenticity also means referring back to a company’s brand and conveying its values and beliefs so that an audience can relate to them, increasing their sense of ownership and trust. To build a genuine connection and increase engagement content must be personalised and authentic and it has to fully describe the client’s individuality amongst its competitors. 

How can you strike the perfect balance?

AI has huge potential to enhance marketing practices and drive revenue for clients. You may already be using it for speeding up the process of content creation (copy, for example, can be generated almost instantly), summarising long pieces of work to obtain the kernel, assisting with idea generation or saving costs. It can incorporate valuable SEO that will push your content up the rankings and it can also provide you with highly specific data-driven insights to inform strategic decisions.

However, what AI will always lack is the human touch, a genuine voice and an emotional depth that customers can relate to. It finds tone of voice difficult, it can’t replicate a lived experience, it doesn’t have an opinion of its own and it’s unable to produce authentic content. 

Balancing the use of AI and producing authentic content, therefore, depends entirely on the instructions it receives and while its effectiveness as a marketing tool is beyond doubt (and its use beyond the event horizon) it still needs the human touch. But it remains exactly that – a tool, albeit a useful one that can add value to marketing endeavours in areas such as targeted advertising, pay-per-click advertising, predictive analysis and search optimisation. For truly genuine and relatable content, that engenders trust and maintains a close connection between the consumer and the brand, however, nothing will ever beat the human touch.

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