Content generation AI vs freelancers: is there an easy answer?

There is currently an influx of AI-powered writing tools that are making waves in the online content production industry. However, Article Forge is approaching the problem a bit differently than its peers. Specifically, Article Forge delivers entire articles with the click of a button rather than requiring you to walk through the writing process to create each piece of content.

In other words, Article Forge is better compared to a freelance writer because they both produce the same deliverable: complete pieces of content. 

It may be difficult, though, for some people to accept that an AI article writer can produce content that is up to snuff. But, the deep learning technology that powers tools like Article Forge has made great strides over the last few years.

To shed some light on the subject, this article discusses several factors that content managers consider when working with freelance writers and compares how AI writers and human freelance writers meet those needs. 

Speed

This category is no contest - Article Forge’s AI writer is significantly faster than human writers. Even the fastest freelance writers will struggle to complete a publish-ready long-form piece of content in less than a couple of hours. An AI article writer like Article Forge, on the other hand, can produce a long-form article of similar quality level in about a minute. 

Of course, the question lies in whether or not AI actually can achieve that similar quality level. This is a complex, multi-faceted question that the following comparisons try to answer. But all things being equal, there is no question that AI writers win over human writers when it comes to speed.

Cost

Article Forge’s AI writer takes the cake in terms of cost too for any business that produces new content on a regular basis. Freelance writers have multiple different ways of charging for their services, but no matter how you slice it, they end up being more expensive than AI writers in the long run. 

The article linked above reports several price ranges per project, per hour, and per word for a variety of different kinds of content that freelancers might write. For example, it gives a range of $5 to $50 per project for the “Articles (content/keyword)” category. In the long run, even the cheapest of these rates cannot compete with the flat monthly rate pricing of AI writers like Article Forge.

Unless you have need for only a one-off writing job and don’t need to churn out content regularly, freelancers are handily outclassed by AI writers in terms of cost. 

Reliability

Though AI writers don’t take this category quite as completely as the previous two, they still come out ahead of freelance writers for the most part. After all, AI writers aren’t subject to complex human life situations or plain-old human irrationality.

Even the best freelance writer can be delayed in their work by any number of factors - personal, professional, medical, spiritual, or anything in between. And unfortunately, not all freelancers are completely accountable and there is no guarantee that a writer will be able to consistently meet deadlines. By contrast, AI writers are affected by none of these factors and deliver their content consistently. 

Of course, AI technology is currently far from perfect and AI writers can have hiccups in quality or relevancy from time to time. But these errors are largely predictable and generally do not prevent the delivery of the final product within a deadline.

Even if an AI writer is unable to produce the highest quality content about some topics, it will consistently produce content at a predictable quality level that human editors can always improve. 

In all, an AI writer is significantly more consistent and reliable than a freelance writer, and the potential for no deliverable by a deadline is a significantly larger risk than a few AI generated mistakes. 

Factual Accuracy

As mentioned above, freelance writers are prone to human inconsistency and error, but they are currently better than AI writers at producing factually accurate content. Fact verification can be a complicated task - even for humans - and the technology simply isn’t far enough along yet for AI writers to fully fact check their content. 

That said, Article Forge is first-in-class among its peers in this area and can produce factually accurate content about most topics. Still, there is room for improvement before this technology can overtake human fact-checkers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a complicated practice, and you might think you need a human writer to apply SEO principles to your business’s content production. But AI writers like Article Forge are excellent for making your content rank on Google and other search engines by design.

This is largely because of the deep learning technology that Article ForgeAI writers use. Specifically, these deep learning models cluster information to find relevant topics to write about. Major search engines like Google use very similar deep learning technology to determine which results will be most relevant to a given search query. This makes AI writers naturally produce content that search engines love. 

Freelance writers, by contrast, have to learn to write for SEO as a separate skill and are not guaranteed to write SEO-friendly content out of the gate. Oftentimes writers or even editors have to go back through the content to make it SEO-friendly after they have written it.

Therefore, AI writers generally win in this category because they natively write SEO-friendly content while freelancers often have to optimize content after the fact, or worse, do not optimize the content at all.

Knowledge of Company Brand and Identity

The fact is that neither freelancers nor AI content writers are particularly great in this area. Currently, AI writers do not have the ability to take in brand-specific information to understand the brand’s identity, and freelancers are usually not integrated into that brand identity enough to fully understand it. In fact, it’s quite common for content managers to have to edit and tailor freelancer-written content to fit the brand’s specific needs.

AI researchers are working on this problem, but currently, the best way to ensure that your content is on-brand is to have full-time or contracted in-house writing staff responsible for editing and finalizing content. 

Deeply Technical or Analytical Content

If your business needs to produce deeply technical or analytical pieces of content, then AI writers are unlikely to be a comprehensive solution. They can be helpful of course, but an AI content writer cannot currently act as a true subject matter expert, especially on novel concepts or topics that require thorough analysis. 

There are some more specialized people who may be able to produce content like this, but you will very quickly be moving into the consulting industry where prices skyrocket. This type of content often requires a full-time, dedicated subject matter expert to write it, which is more than some businesses can afford. 

Again, neither freelancers nor AI writers are the most appropriate choice to write this kind of content, but humans are currently the better choice in this category.

Editorial or Opinion Pieces

This category is not quite as much of a blowout as you might think. Freelancers do win here, but it’s worth noting that Article Forge can produce convincing editorial content. It can explain a topic in a way that advances a certain opinion, based on the keyword entered by the user. 

That said, it currently cannot formulate deeply analytical thoughts about that topic or provide original insight. Therefore, freelancers have an edge over AI writers in this area.

Of course, pieces like this - editorials, reaction-based opinions, etc. - are not the only type of content that can be created for SEO purposes. In fact, research shows that these pieces are not even the kind of content that most content marketers need to be producing regularly. 

Conclusion

While every situation is different, there is, in most cases, quite an easy answer to whether you should use an AI writer or a freelancer. Here’s a recap of the results of our comparisons:

• Speed - AI writers
• Cost - AI writers
• Reliability - AI writers
• Factual Accuracy - freelance writers
• SEO - AI writers
• Knowledge of Company Brand and Identity - neither are great
• Technical or Analytical Content - neither are great, but freelance writers have an edge
• Editorial or Opinion Pieces - both work, but freelance writers may currently be better

When looking strictly at the numbers, that’s 4 for AI writers, 3 for freelance writers, and 1 tie.

But the fact of the matter is that speed and cost are two of the most important aspects of content production, and Article Forge is leaps and bounds ahead of freelance writers in these areas. The speed and cost advantages of Article Forge offset its disadvantages in almost every other category, especially since its weaknesses in factual accuracy, brand strategy, and opinion pieces can be easily mitigated by spending a little bit of time editing.

All things considered, AI writers can cover the vast majority of what freelancers usually do at a fraction of the cost and time investment.