UGC is best known for its ability to humanize brands, strengthen consumer trust, and produce lasting emotional connections. With the rise of generative AI recently, there is now talk of AI-generated content. This is any form of UGC that is created or enhanced by artificial intelligence. It can change existing UGC or create new content from scratch. We feel that there are so many things that can go wrong here. Does it not take away the entire point of what benefits UGC has to offer in the first place? People trust real people… How can you “humanize” your brand if you’re not even using humans? AI will never have contextual understanding and it will lead to users feeling disconnected. UGC contains local events and current trends that are based on context many times. AI will not be able to touch on this. The biggest elephant in the room is AI's lack of diversity and bias. These machine learning models are trained by humans and therefore, will inherit bias and stereotypes. Another important point to make is that no matter how “creative” the content it spits out will be, it will never have originality or depth. The only way AI can create this content is by using UGC which is already out there for a baseline. It takes all of this content and mixes it to come up with another piece of content. UGC captures emotional moments of joy, fear, comedic relief, and empathy that AI could never replace.
Interestingly enough, two different companies did two separate interviews with our CEO. One was done through a series of questions that were then generated into an article via AI programming. The other was conducted by a journalist and written by them. When we released the two articles separately about one week from each other. The human-written article outperformed the AI-generated article. We’re sure that many factors could have contributed to this, such as time of release, etc. But, we can’t help but wonder if people responded more positively to the article written personally by the journalist because deep down they felt it was more human and emotionally written. After all, it was—just something to think about.
