Sometimes, you just need the human touch...
What kinds of content can humans do better than AI? The last few posts here have, I have to admit, been a bit of doom and gloom. I’ve looked at how conversational AI is going to squeeze search traffic to publisher sites, and at how adopting AI for content generation will remove the key competitive advantage of publishers.
But there are areas of content creation where publishers can use their ability to do things at scale and the talent they have to make great work that audiences will love.
I’ve broken this post out into three parts, covering three different kinds of content. Today, I’m going to look at one which is close to my heart: reviews. Tomorrow and Thursday I’ll look at two other examples where humans can win.
Doing reviews right
One of the points that I made last week was that affiliate content, in particular, was susceptible to the shift to conversational ways of working with computers. However, that doesn’t mean that reviews are going to disappear. Certain types of article are likely to remain an area where humans will continue to produce better content for other humans for the foreseeable future.
For many sites, creating content for affiliate purposes has involved a lot of round-up articles, often created at least in part with what gets called “desk-based research”. You are not reviewing a product you have in your hand, you are researching everything about it that a consumer could possibly need to know, and summarizing it helpfully.
I’ve sometimes argued this was OK in certain circumstances, as long as you flag it and the amount of work that goes into the article is high. Just casting around for whatever is top-rated on Amazon doesn’t cut it because a reader can do that quickly themselves. But if you’re saving someone hours of time in research, you’re still performing a valuable service for them.
That kind of content isn’t going to survive the increased use of conversational AI because one thing that LLMs will be excellent at is ingesting lots of data and combining it into a cogent recommendation. LLMs can read every piece of Amazon feedback, every spec sheet and every piece of manufacturer data faster and more accurately than any human can. If your content is just research, it’s not going to be viable in the world of AI.
What will work is direct first-person experience of the product, written to focus on the less tangible things about it. An LLM can read a car spec sheet and tell you about its torque, but it can’t tell you how it feels to accelerate it around a corner. An LLM can look at a spec sheet for a laptop, but it can’t tell you how good the keyboard is to type on for extended periods.
If your editorial teams are focused on what I used to call “speeds, feeds and data” then part of your approach should be to shake up the way they write to get them closer to a more personal perspective. One way to do this is to change style.
Back when we launched Alphr at Dennis, one of the first changes I made to editorial style was to stop using the UK tech traditional plural in reviews (“we tested this and found blah”) and shift to first person (“I tested this and found blah”). Shifting into first person forces the writer into a more subjectively human perspective on the product you’re looking it. It frees the writer from an overly objective point of view into a more personal experience, and that is something which will survive the world of LLMs. Don’t just say what the specs are: say what it feels like, as a human being, to use this product.
Tomorrow, I’m going to look at the second area I think is a clear “win” for human-generated content: the often maligned area of real life stories.
