If readers can’t tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated stories, why bother with the human element? Following the launch of CPL One Group’s AI-generated news writing service, our managing director has a robust response.
“AI stories preferred to human written ones.”
Bearing in mind CPL One Group’s long-established editorial credentials, it won’t surprise you that, among the many AI-related headlines of recent weeks, my eye was caught by this one from BBC News.
The BBC story quoted from a study by Cambridge University Press, where researchers had tested to see whether people aged between 18 and 81 could tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated short stories.
The answer? They couldn’t.
In fact, according to the study, readers gave the highest ratings to stories created by artificial intelligence, believing they had been written by humans.
Meanwhile, here at CPL One we have just updated our AI policy. Called ‘Humans always in charge’, it outlines how our team members should and should not use artificial intelligence tools. It points out from the very start that “AI is an assistant to enhance productivity, not a replacement for human skill, creative judgment or accountability”.
So, you might ask, how can these two things be compatible? If readers can’t tell the difference between human-written and AI-generated stories, why bother with the human element?
The answer, of course, is that professional, human, expert journalists are absolutely fundamental to good, authoritative, trustworthy editorial content.
This has been borne out by our trial with On the wire, an innovation that uses AI technology to source and generate relevant industry news stories, delivering real time, copyright-clean content drawn from millions of open sources worldwide.
In line with our ‘humans always in charge’ mantra, our trained journalists choose which stories to publish and take an active role in checking their quality and accuracy.
A key point from the BBC report is that the study focused only on short stories. This is also the case with On the wire content. Analytics and feedback from our trial shows readers are comfortable with short AI-generated stories, if they’re clearly marked as such, and if they know that our journalists are still checking them. Our analysis shows readers are spending as much time looking at short news stories originally researched and generated via AI, as they are on short digest-type stories originally researched and written by journalists.
However, when it comes to long form content, such as high-quality interviews, insight and analysis pieces, then AI doesn’t stand a chance by comparison. That’s where our journalists really come into their own. They create rich, compelling articles by maximising their ability to glean exclusive information and nuance from human conversations with other humans, more often than not conveying that person-to-person emotion to the audience.
The majority of the written stories in the many magazines, theatre programmes and online channels we create are delivered in this longer format. AI just can’t match the quality, insight and readability of a professionally written journalistic piece – and our editors and sub-editors are highly suspicious if it ever seems that long-form articles being submitted to us have come more via AI than via a human.
At the same time, our On the wire licence means short industry-specific news stories can be researched and generated far more quickly and cost-effectively than has been the case up to now.
For one client’s magazine website we now publish three times as many news stories each month than was the case previously – for a fraction of the cost per story. This will enable us to drive more and higher quality traffic to the site and, in time, provide opportunities to generate more commercial revenue from the site.
As the headlines of recent weeks have proven, there are many things to worry about when it comes to AI. But clients and readers of CPL One content can rest assured that, thanks to our commitment to high-quality, human-generated storytelling, the launch of On the wire is not one of them.
If you’re interested in whether On the wire might be useful for you or your organisation, please get in touch with me at [email protected]
You might also find these two stories from our website useful:
Introducing On the wire – a potential game changer for membership bodies
Why the ‘AI vs Human’ narrative is broken
