Third Wave Marketing: Human-made Speciality Content

AI is everywhere. It has been a trending topic for more than a year now. With the advent of ChatGPT, there are many predictions, regarding the future of content production. Is the authentic content still valid in 2024? We think so. And so do the big players like Meta.

Meta AI Content Policy Changes

Last week Meta announced that the company would be changing the policy of handling manipulated media, based on feedback provided by the Oversight Board, and policy review. Meta's policy review process also involves opinion surveys and expert consultations. In essence, video, audio, and image content would receive a “Made with AI” label, should Meta “detect industry standard AI image indicators or when people disclose that they’re uploading AI-generated content”. This is to provide transparency, for the manipulated media to be easily detected.

Notably, this is just an update of Meta's manipulated media policy that had been originally written back in 2020, when realistic AI-generated content was rare and mainly limited to videos. With the AI expansion to audio and photos, it is, as the Oversight Board of the company noted, “equally important to address manipulation that shows a person doing something they didn't do”.

Meta’s Oversight Board decided that deletion and removal of manipulated media would restrict the freedom of expression. Labeling was chosen instead, as less restrictive. AI label is going to be added to content that is detected, or expressly designated as AI generated.

Meta adds “If we determine that digitally-created or altered images, video or audio create a particularly high risk of materially deceiving the public on a matter of importance, we may add a more prominent label so people have more information and context. This overall approach gives people more information about the content so they can better assess it and so they will have context if they see the same content elsewhere.”

The company plans to start labeling AI-generated content as of May and stop removing the manipulated content in July. In general, Meta started researching this problem in the Spring of 2023, and it took almost a year to come up with a relevant policy, through a dialogue with more than 120 stakeholders in 34 countries, as the company claims. Meta also conducted public opinion research with more than 23,000 respondents in 13 countries, asking how social media companies, such as Meta, should approach AI-generated content on their platforms. 82% of the respondents favored the labeling.

This is a lot to understand and unpack. But what does it mean for content creators, companies, marketers, and content marketing experts? In essence, it means that the human-created content will gain more value. As the AI-generated content is force-fed to us, and dominates our newsfeeds now, spotting authentic, real stuff has become a challenge these days.

Authenticity – Handmade by Humans

We view this as an opportunity for genuine content to shine. We may be going into an era where, if our newsfeeds are dominated by AI-generated content, genuine, authentic, human-generated content will be perceived as more valuable.

This is where it would be worth telling stories of flesh and blood, instead of using ChatGPT. I wrote it, a few weeks ago, that after initially being amazed by what the AI can do, I ditched ChatGPT as a copywriting tool.

Good copywriting and stories inspire the reader to feel. It is still difficult to evoke real emotional responses, using language models. Keeping that in mind, AI is still good for brainstorming. Just not for writing content you want to put out there!

Of course, some AI evangelists may gather here and say: Your prompts are wrong, and hence you're not getting what you want.

I don't think so.

I think we are approaching a revolution in marketing and storytelling that would be somewhat reminiscent of the third-wave coffee revolution in the specialty coffee industry. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, let me explain. Third-wave coffee is a movement in the coffee industry and marketing that places the key emphasis on high quality. The trend assumes that coffee beans are sourced from individual farms. Light roasts and alternative brewing methods have also become more popular with that wave, making coffee similar to wine in many respects, with different beans having distinctive flavor profiles.

The clear sourcing background is somewhat aligned with the clear labeling of content, making the audience aware of whether they are exposed to AI content or not. And this makes authentic stories, made by humans, even more valuable.

We may be entering an era where a division would happen in the marketing and advertising industry. Businesses embracing AI may become mass production, while the agencies turning towards human-generated content would be perceived as boutique ones. AI-generated content would be like a mass-produced vehicle. Human-written content, on the other hand, could be viewed as a handmade, luxurious car that costs millions.

Coming back to the coffee metaphor: picture genuine, human-made content as a cup of fair trade sourced coffee made by a professional barista, instead of being served a beverage made by an automatic machine and poured into a single-use paper cup.

We, at Koekepeer, are proud to say that all of our stories are human-made. By us. The real humans.

But aren’t we slowly approaching an era in which AI is also almost human? Just not a genuine one?