Human vs AI: Which Writer Wins The Race?

Whether in the industry or not, you simply cannot escape the noise of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it is changing daily life. ChatGPT has swiftly become a name everyone knows, and regardless of how you feel about it currently, become a part of projects from conception to implementation. There is also Google’s offering of…

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For those unfamiliar with the AI software available, it may feel overwhelming and unclear what you should invest time and money into. While AI can help create code, we are looking specifically at using AI in writing content.

So, how does AI writing work? What is AI writing, and why should you take note of it? Should you consider implementing an AI writer into your team? And, most important, perhaps, how does AI vs Human really stack up?

The Power of AI and Writing Content

The AI landscape has certainly boomed since the beginning of 2023. According to the latest data in May 2023 from Exploding Topics, over 100 million users are accessing ChatGPT. The ChatGPT website generates an incredible 1.8 billion visitors per month. People are using ChatGPT for various reasons, including AI writing examples such as writing children’s books for parents to read at bedtime. However, ChatGPT isn’t the only tool on the market – although it is certainly the most renowned.

Available Tools:

ChatGPT – The one everyone knows!
Bard – Google’s AI answer. Bard is very similar to ChatGPT in that both utilise chatbots to give people the necessary information.
WriteSonic – Offers templates to create an outline and an optimised article.
Surfer – Offers a planner including keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. and SERP analysis before writing.
Article Forge – Claims it will deliver high-quality content within 60 seconds. Article Forge will generate all the content you need, not just an outline.

These 5 tools are by no means the only ones online. Bing also has its own AI, which you can read more about Bing’s AI Search Upgrade on our blog.

Let’s look at ChatGPT as our example for the question of AI vs human.

ChatGPT uses the GPT language model built by OpenAI to answer questions, write copy, code in different programming languages, and even hold a conversation. It does so all based on the natural language prompts a user has.

By using a chatbot format, users can ask questions such as, “please provide 4 article titles for a restaurant” and watch as it ‘types’ back the answers. What makes ChatGPT special is that it remembers every facet of a conversation you have had. It can understand a previous question and use that in future conversations. For AI in writing, you can ask it to rewrite and reword sections without having to put the information back into it.

To get to a more technical level, the data that trained ChatGPT means it can bring forth a string of words to answer a user’s prompt. This training involved roughly 500 billion ‘tokens’ that helped teach the program in language models. These ‘tokens’ relate to words – it is estimated that tokens are 4 characters long.

But where did it get these tokens? Well, tokens are taken from masses of data that humans wrote. Yes, human data is powering a program people fear will replace humans! The data includes everything from books and articles to essays and legal documents. Anything that was available on the open internet will have been placed into the ‘tokens.’

The incredible dataset formed a deep learning neural network, a complex algorithm modelled after the human brain. It further assists ChatGPT in learning patterns and relationships in the text to enable it to perform human-like responses, no matter the question.

What’s more, ChatGPT was optimised for dialogue by using a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF). This technique essentially had humans rewarding the AI with comparison data, enabling the AI to learn exactly what was the best response. The free version of Chat GPT, Chat GPT-3.5, has 175 billion variables that allow it to take your input (‘prompt’) and will value and weigh the data it has before giving you the output it thinks matches your request best.

Of course, it’s not perfect, it will occasionally give you the wrong answer, but you can then ask it over and over, which makes it learn and develop further for future use.

One thing that sticks out in the AI and writing discussion, especially for SEO, is what does Google think? Is Google penalising sites that are using AI content? After all, E-E-A-T is such an integral part of Google’s rankings that surely AI content goes against this.

The short answer is no; Google is not penalising sites. It can detect the use of AI content. However, it will not affect rankings if the content is created and written for people first, not the search engines. E-E-A-T guidelines do state that all information should be up-to-date, which may affect AI content if the AI data is not kept up to date.

AI vs Human Content Writing

So, there’s no denying that AI is incredibly powerful and has a vast array of positives. What does it mean for human content writers?

AI Pros

An AI writer has an endless stream of inspiration, making it your best friend when it comes to article outlines. You can map out an entire article from title to conclusion, asking for the word count you need to ensure the inspiration provides enough words to play with.
An AI writer never needs a day off or a holiday. AI won’t call in sick half an hour before their shift is due to start. It is online 24/7, which is both a blessing and a curse!
The speed AI generates content is lightning-fast. There’s no waiting around for hours and no writers getting writer’s block halfway through a project.

Human Pros

There is only so much humanising the AI can do to a piece of content. With a human writer, you instantly get that ‘human touch’ which can turn a dry subject into something magical and something people want to read. That’s beneficial to readers and massively beneficial for E-E-A-T and your Google rankings.
Human writers can get up close and personal with your brand and truly understand who you are and why you do what you do best.
The written word from a skilled writer will always be difficult to reproduce, no matter how much data an AI is given.
Humans are instinct storytellers – we craft and create whole worlds using just words. AI will never be able to do this, especially as the data is pulled from sources where such magic has already been born.

AI Cons

AI naturally struggles with emotion and how it understands feelings. Currently, AI cannot engage an audience through relatable stories, which means that the emotional connection between customer and purchase is lost. Humans make decisions based on impulses, emotions, morals, and desires – all of which are not logical and cannot be replicated easily with data and analytics.
What’s more, AI has no idea of morals or ethics.
All the data in the AI model is existing content. It’s this reason why AI content is easily flagged on plagiarism software. Nothing is original when you use AI in writing. Plagiarism is something that Google takes incredibly seriously, so AI content is lacking in this department and can cause issues down the line.

Human Cons

Of course, when you compare human vs human, you will find that the standard and quality can vary just as much as AI tool to AI tool. With a human writer, you trust them to understand the concept and fact-check their work.
Research for a very specific subject can be time-consuming.
The best writers will always be the most expensive, so from a business perspective, this edges AI slightly above.

Our Verdict

In the race of AI vs humans, there can only be 1 winner in our eyes for authority articles and content, and no, it’s not AI. There’s no denying that an AI writer and a human writer can be a wonderful mix together. Still, as it currently works, AI cannot replicate the wonderful storytelling and emotional writing that both readers and Google seek.

AI in writing may become more prevalent as the software grows and evolves, but what a human writer offers is currently much more valuable than an AI program. That’s why we only use human writers and editors in our Content Writing Services.

However, let’s not discredit AI too much. For short, snappy content, such as meta descriptions, AI can speed up the process incredibly well.

Top Tip: If you do choose to run your own experiment with AI vs human, always use a human editor! They will provide your content with that all-too-important human touch.

If you would like to discover more about writing and AI and how they blend with SEO, contact a member of our team today; we’re always happy to help!

We also have a series of handy articles covering this topic, including Is This The End of Human Written Content? We also explore how AI and SEO work together in our article The Future of SEO with Artificial Intelligence.