Human versus AI: A Copywriting showdown
The evidence is in... and it's not even close
If you believe the AI evangelists and Silicon Valley utopians, computers will soon have surpassed old-fashioned human beings in pretty much any task that involves using a brain.
There’s no doubt that the speed with which AI can produce written content is remarkable (or terrifying, depending on your perspective). But is it really as miraculous as it seems?
Superficially, it certainly looks pretty good. But how does it stack up against the content created by a good human copywriter?
Marketing guru, Neil Patel, uses both AI and human copywriting with his clients, and wanted to understand more about the pros and cons of each approach.
In search of hard data, his team published 744 articles across 68 websites, evenly split between human-written and ChatGPT-generated content. They left the content live for a few months, then compared the results.
In the first month after publication, there was already a striking difference in performance, with human copy generating about three times as many visits as AI. Fast forward to month five, and the difference was even more stark: human posts were garnering 5.4 times as many eyeballs than the AI authored content.
Over the course of the study, while traffic to the AI posts had roughly doubled, traffic to the human posts had increased by a factor of 4.
And Patel’s team discovered that the human content was outranking AI on search rankings 94% of the time.
We know AI is much faster at churning out content than a person, but even this doesn’t seem to create an overall advantage: Per minute spent creating a post, human copywriters were found to generate 4.1 views, whereas AI generated just 3.3.
What’s more, the capacity of AI to produce content at scale can even work against your marketing efforts. Overused, AI seems to drain a website’s SEO in the same way producing huge quantities of low quality human authored content can.
Patel believes the problem with AI content is that it simply regurgitates existing content from the web. It has no real experience to draw on, and so it can’t produce unique takes. And when people are looking for insight and information on the web, they usually want to read something they haven’t seen before.
Search engine algorithms also punish derivative and unoriginal content, with material identified as mass-produced, lacking human oversight, or existing just to manipulate rankings classified as spam.
Google emphasises “Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness”, and it’s hard to see how purely AI generated content can score highly by these standards.
In many things in life, the Pareto Law hold true: you get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort.
But when it comes to copywriting, 20% of the effort is never enough. All it does it get your content to look like everything else, and that means being swallowed up in the great ocean of mediocre content the internet has become.
To stand out, you need to find an original approach, to say something new, to tap into an emotional angle everyone else has missed. And for that, only a living, breathing, feeling human being will do.
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