Since 2022, AI has been all the rage. Most of us who have been navigating social media for the last 10 to 15 years before it came in wouldn’t have been able to imagine that automation would create such a huge impact all over the world.
Even ten years ago, being able to stand out on social media was more important than following trends. But now, trends are everything, and algorithms control us more than we would like to think.
Using automation to make content for your audience is very common now, but not everyone admits it.
Most creators want to project that they create content organically, so even if they use AI in the process, they tend to hide it. But just because you are not being honest about it, does it mean they won’t know?
Discover whether your audience is aware of your AI use, their reaction to it, and what can be done to make written AI content more consumable by your audience.
Land of Generic Content
AI is good at a lot of things. It will take all the menial tasks out of your hands and get them done faster than you could.
Automation is the top tool in any profession to make the work process more efficient and faster. In writing, it has made the most progress, and it is capable of writing pretty much anything that it has data on. However, the quality of the output is something else entirely.
AI tends to produce content based on the pattern it learns from the data that has been fed into it. This pattern-based writing often comes out monotonous and robotic, with not much to separate one output from the other in terms of what it is written about.
The style, the tone, the format, the grammar, and the flow tend to remain too similar. This is why generic content
Now, with every other creator using AI to create posts, scripts, captions, etc, every other written word online is starting to sound the same. Hence, we have officially entered the world of generic content.
And because your audiences are also using AI for their work and personal use, they generally know exactly how it sounds, which is often one reason why generic AI content is easy to spot.
The Audience is Armed With Detectors
Fooling the audience in the age of AI is not easy, and it also shouldn’t be practiced. If creators have AI tools, so does the audience.
If they spot content that feels automated, all they have to do is copy the text and run it through their preferred AI detector.
If the tool is even halfway decent, it would be able to detect that your post is AI. Then your audience will have actual proof that you are using automation for your written content.
Because the more decent detectors are now over 90% accurate, claiming that their mechanism is giving false positives won’t exactly work.
The Uncanny Valley Effect
One famous Japanese roboticist called Masahiro Mori, had penned a theory about non-human entities like AI. He has said that people are initially happy and comfortable engaging with something that grows increasingly human.
This is why realistic animation generally becomes quite popular. However, there is a point it reaches when it looks eerily human but not quite.
Let’s say all the features are fine, but the eyes come out wrong, or the movements are unusual. This perfect but not quite state puts humans in immediate discomfort, which is generally known as the Uncanny Valley Effect.
This is our natural mechanism that warns us against something that feels like a threat. Strangely enough, this also gets triggered with writing.
When something sounds perfectly normal, but you can still tell something is wrong, it is the uncanny valley effect. When having to engage regularly with AI content that has not been humanized, audiences grow weary and feel a natural aversion towards it.
So, you can say that each human has an auto AI detection mechanism within them, which will get triggered by your AI-written post. And, eventually, they will figure out what is wrong with the content, even if they don’t immediately know what it is.
Research Says Majority of the Audience Are Weary of AI
Recent research has shown that around 75% of the audience approaches AI-generated content for creators or marketing with skepticism. This is not just because such content is difficult to consume. It is mostly because they tend to be shallow and have the risk of being filled with misinformation.
AI tends to hallucinate, especially when it either doesn’t have the information you need or it is not being able to access that information. So, instead, it may give you pattern-based misinformation in such a plausible form that you won’t be able to tell whether it is accurate or not.
AI has been found to make up quotes, citations, people, and data that don’t exist, which is why Audiences are worried about its use in written words.
Unedited AI texts tend to be very off-putting and unreliable; this is why AI-generated writings need to be altered significantly before they are ready for consumption by the audience.
How to Make AI-written Content More Acceptable to the Audience?
If you are using AI to generate your content, the key is not hiding the AI use. Here are a few things you can do to ensure your audience has no issue consuming your AI-generated content.
Edit the Output
Not using the AI-generated output as is is crucial to the success of your posts. You must humanize it first. When the words come out, they lack warmth, they lack readability, and they certainly lack the dynamic personality that comes from humans.
Make It More Readable
Now it is your job to add those back to the writing. The first thing to do is swap out the words AI uses frequently, like “intentional” or “navigate.”
Then, you change the sentences that don’t feel right. You have your own natural instincts you can lean into, or you can also use a checker to see which parts look particularly AI, so that you can get that changed.
Add Personality
Next, you need to add to the personality of the words. This is where you add little anecdotes, quotes, and any bits from your lived experience to enrich the words, make them reflect you. This can be crucial for a content creator’s personal branding.
Double Down On Branding
If you are representing a brand, this is where you ensure the messaging aligns with your brand identity, values, tone, and message. It can be vital for your brand’s growth to ensure that whatever posts come from the business embody the feeling of the brand.
Prompt With Your Own Data
Limit how much you leave at the hands of AI when generating. You need to get smarter with your prompting. Feed it the data you want it to use to limit what it says in the writing. This can also eliminate or at least reduce the chance of hallucination.
However, you need to be sensitive with data that is too sensitive. Consider turning off the function within your preferred LLM that allows the model to learn from your inputs. This puts a somewhat guardrail to protect your data, but it is best not to feed something to AI that needs to be protected, which could include your intellectual property.
Fact Check
No matter what you are generating on AI, you need to ensure you fact-check it, especially if it is making a claim or referring to a source. Because AI tends to hallucinate, the best practice is to ensure that you either manually or using AI, check the claims to ensure they are facts.
Being Transparent
If you are using AI in your posts or any other work process, be honest about it. Your audience would want to know. Being transparent and open about how you do things can build and strengthen trust.
Even if they don’t want you to use AI, the fact that you were transparent will encourage them to put their faith in your content.
Final Thoughts
By now, you know that the majority of your audience will not only know that you are using AI for your posts, but they will also not be okay with it. They can easily prove it is AI using a checker, so it is better not to lie about it.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use AI. Control the prompt; make sure to edit the output and add personality.
Fact-checking is also crucial, but the most important thing might just be transparency. Because how will they trust you if they can’t trust you to be honest about the use? This is why use AI wisely, and make sure your audience knows about it.
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