Machines write better than agencies and humans. This is the result of a new study by the Institute for Conversational Business at Aalen University. In the study, landing pages, blog posts and social media posts of international TOP brands were compared with AI-generated alternatives.
Prof. Dr. Peter Gentsch
Aalen / Cologne, 28.09.2022 – Artificial intelligence writes better marketing texts than humans in agencies – this is the result of a study conducted by Aalen University under the leadership of AI expert Prof. Dr. Peter Gentsch. “According to both the subjective evaluations of our test group of a good 100 people and the objective results of the Flesch metric, the variants of the compared marketing content written by artificial intelligence are better than their originals,” says AI researcher and pioneer Prof. Dr. Peter Gentsch.
As part of the study “Man or machine: Who writes the better content?” Gentsch at the Institute for Conversational Business at Aalen University selected and analyzed landing pages, blog posts and social media posts from Telekom, Vodafone, Garnier, L’Oreal, M&Ms and Starbucks. Then, the AI content platform of the MarTech startup rellify was used to find the relevant topics and keywords for this content. Based on the results of this AI analysis, OpenAI’s AI writing platform GPT-3 was then used to produce new content on the topics and keywords of the original content.
“We then presented the AI texts and the originals to 100 randomly selected people for evaluation,” Gentsch said of the study design. “At the same time, we classified the original texts and the AI versions according to the scientifically accepted Flesch metric.”
The results of both evaluations were as clear as they were astonishing, says AI expert Gentsch: “According to both the subjective and the objective evaluation, the AI-generated texts were slightly to significantly better. From the subjects’ point of view, the AI texts were not only easier to read and more appealing, but also surprisingly ‘more personal’,” Gentsch summarizes the survey results. But the AI-generated content also generally performed better in terms of the Flesch Index, he says: “In terms of objective readability, the machine-written texts are consistently better, in some cases even significantly better.”
Despite these results, however, AI today is not yet per se a better author than a professional copywriter or an agency, Gentsch emphasizes: “It still doesn’t work without human influence.” On the one hand, the machine-generated input from the AI ideation phase would have to be checked and possibly “filtered” or cleaned up by hand. For another, he says, fine-tuning the prompts and parameterizing the GPT-3 platform is absolutely critical to success. “Only a fact check can ensure that any factual errors in the writing AI are detected and cleaned up,” the professor said.
Gentsch therefore also relativizes the thesis postulated at the beginning that machines would text better than humans. The human factor is still decisive for the quality of the results of AI-supported content creation, he concludes: “Human expertise is still needed for setting up the AI, but above all for quality assurance and fact checking. At the same time, however, the study also shows that with this support, better results can be produced in less time – and thus at lower cost. My prediction is therefore that the tasks in content creation will shift – in the future, humans will be needed less for the actual copywriting, but will focus more on strategic aspects, the story line and always also the quality assurance of the intelligent machines.”
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