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Humans prefer AI-generated content study finds ft. ChatGPT alternatives

edition 6 2024

Author

Edwina Kolomanski
February 07, 2024

✨Welcome to untechnical✨
This is tech content made for the untechnical.

For those who are new here, this weekly newsletter is an easy and approachable way for you to incrementally build your knowledge and skills in all things new tech, AI and automation, while also staying up-to-date with a curated summary of the week’s AI/tech news.

So let’s get into it!

In this week’s edition

  1. 🗞 Weekly News Digest:

    → Musk-backed Neuralink brain chip implanted in first human!

    → Amazon launches new AI tool - Rufus - but who actually benefits from it?
    → Generative AI edges out human copywriting skills in a recent Semrush study

  2. 💡Tech Tool Spotlight: ChatGPT alternatives.

  3. 🪁 Playground: Love trivia? Trivial Pursuit meets AI

  4. 🤓 Hungry for more? Further reading AI / Tech news links

  5. 💬 Feedback

Weekly News Digest 🗞

There’s no shortage of news about tech, AI and automation but it’s hard to know what you should tune into. Here, I summarise noteworthy news from the week and why you should care.

Source: Neuralink

What happened? 

  • You might have seen the news on mainstream media channels but in case you missed it, Elon Musk's Neuralink announced the successful implantation of a brain chip in a human for the first time.

Tell me more:

  • The brain chip, known as the ‘Link,’ was implanted into a person with quadriplegia, demonstrating its potential to restore mobility and communication.

  • Link works by allowing the brain to communicate directly with external devices and computers. It reads neural signals, enabling users to control computers, prosthetic limbs, or even communicate with text or speech, just by thinking. 

  • This groundbreaking technology has the potential to revolutionise the lives of people with disabilities, providing them with newfound independence and the ability to interact with the world in ways that were previously unimaginable.

Why is this important/interesting? 

  • While this achievement is remarkable, it's important to note that further research and testing are required before widespread adoption. 

  • Nevertheless, the successful implantation of the brain chip marks a significant step toward a future where technology and human brains can seamlessly merge for the benefit of individuals facing physical challenges.

2. Amazon launches new AI tool - Rufus - but who actually benefits from it?

Source: Amazon

What happened? 

  • AI is about to start changing how you interact with the Amazon e-commerce platform.

  • Last Friday, Amazon announced the launch of its new generative AI-powered conversational shopping assistant, Rufus, that responds to customer queries on its platform. 

Tell me more:

  • Rufus aims to improve the shopping experience by providing quick and accurate answers to users' questions.

  • Amazon has shared that this new tool is trained on Amazon’s extensive product catalogue, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web to help answer queries on a range of topics such as shopping needs and products, provide comparisons, and make recommendations.

  • However, concerns have arisen regarding the potential impact on users and third-party sellers and whether Amazon will prioritise the ‘best’ product for a user, or if the AI-powered tool will prioritise Amazon’s own products or sponsored products in responses and search results.

Why is this important/interesting? 

  • Companies like Amazon do not have to disclose information about the algorithm behind their AI-powered tools. This means it’s difficult to determine whether engaging with search tools, like Rufus, will produce a better result for us (as consumers) or Amazon and the third parties who pay to boost their products on the Amazon platform, so we see them. 

  • Until we know more, I think it’s prudent to continue conducting our own research versus relying solely on commercial search engines to decide what’s best for us!

3: AI edges out human copywriting skills in recent study

What happened? 

  • A recent survey of 700 US consumers found that AI-generated content was preferred by humans more than human-generated content.

Tell me more: 

  • The survey was included as part of a larger Semrush report called Think Big with AI: Transforming Small Business Content Marketing and consisted of a series of tasks that compared the survey participants’ preferences for an AI-generated or human-generated piece of content. 

  • In six head-to-head tasks, the generative AI output won out. 

Here’s an example of where the task was to write an introduction for a blog post about the best cat food for indoor cats.

AI narrowly beat the human result 54% to 46%.

Source: Semrush Think Big with AI Report

In the other five rounds, AI outperformed humans at writing social media ads, writing a blog post paragraph, a social media post, and a product description.

Why people likely preferred the AI-generated content:

  • It quickly got to the point.

  • It clearly highlighted value propositions or reader concerns.

  • It was easier to read and understand.

While AI can’t entirely replace humans in content creation, clearly generative AI can create content that resonates.

Tech Tool Spotlight 💡

Here, I deep-dive into a selected tech tool to show you what’s possible and ways you can apply the tool.

ChatGPT Alternatives

As an untechnical subscriber, I would be surprised if you hadn’t heard of ChatGPT. 

But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you didn’t know any other ChatGPT alternatives. There are a lot of them(!), so this week, let’s build up your awareness of other ChatGPT alternatives. 🙂 

The below focuses on text-based AI tools.

1. Claude

Created by Anthropic, Claude is an ethical alternative to ChatGPT that excels in summarisation, editing, Q&A, decision-making, and code-writing.

2. Character AI

character.ai allows users to have open-ended conversations and dialogue with customised chatbots.

3. Bard

Bard is Google's conversational, AI chat service, which functions much like ChatGPT. The biggest difference is that Bard can pull almost real-time information from the web.

4. ChatGPT / GPT-4

OpenAI’s groundbreaking AI tool. Currently the world’s most used generative AI tool. No further explanation is necessary 😉 

5. Copilot

Copilot is Microsoft’s latest AI tool that leverages OpenAI’s technology and models and integrates with Microsoft 365 products.

6. Jasper

Jasper AI is an AI writing tool that helps users easily create content - especially marketing content. It can be used to create content including blog posts, product descriptions, marketing copy, and more.

7. Quillbot

QuillBot is an AI-powered paraphrasing and summarising tool that helps users improve their writing and can rewrite any sentence, paragraph, or article.

8. writesonic

Writesonic is an AI writer that creates SEO-friendly content for blogs, Facebook ads, Google ads, and Shopify for free.

9. Copy AI

Copy.ai is a similar tool to Jasper and helps businesses craft ad copy and all kinds of marketing content.

Playground 🪁

Experimenting with new tech, AI and automation is one of the best ways to learn. But it can be hard to know where to start or what to play around with. Here, I provide an example of what I’ve been playing around with recently to give you some inspiration.

Trivial Pursuit Infinite

Do you love to play trivia? Me too! And this week I’ve found a way to talk about it in untechnical. Who says AI can’t be fun? 😃 

Trivial Pursuit Infinite was released last month by toy maker Hasbro.

It’s effectively an online version of the classic game that uses AI to generate questions based on a player’s interests and suggestions.

You can choose from two play modes - a daily challenge with typical Trivial Pursuit questions and an ‘infinite’ mode in which you can ask questions about any topic.

Hungry for more?

Every week I wonder if there’s going to be enough to talk about. But I seem to have the opposite problem with so many news items I think you’ll find interesting. If you’re hungry for more information, below is a list of additional news items I’ve come across that you might like to have a squiz at!

Further AI / Tech news links

  • Microsoft partners with Semafor for AI-assisted news content → Read more

  • A Harvard diploma, a PhD, or a stint at Google are no longer the best signifiers of the top minds in artificial intelligence → Read more

  • AI used to decipher a 2000yr old scroll buried by a volcanic eruption wins the Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize → Read more

  • NYU research gains insights into how children learn how to speak by training an AI model on first-person video and audio captured from a baby's life → Read more

Before you go, if you think anyone else would benefit from untechnical content, share the below link with them!

Feedback 🎯

This newsletter is a two-way street. Learning more about what you’d like to see more/less of and what content is going to support you best is incredibly important.

💬 Do you have any feedback that may help improve future editions of untechnical? Any questions? Or content requests?

Get in touch by replying to this email.

That’s all for this week!

✨ Thanks for tuning in!