How AI is Helping Companies and Influencers Publish Content

Content creation and marketing is a painstaking business. AI tools are emerging to help content creators and marketing teams cut out repetitive tasks and devote themselves to the human tasks, like engaging with prospects, that technology alone cannot manage.

Antoine Amann, CEO and founder of Echobox, connected with Street Fight to discuss the future of AI in content creation.

How is AI helping publishers create and/or manage content?

While we see some applications today of AI as a content creator for publishers (think “robojournalism” where automation is used to generate simple templated articles, such as reporting scores on local sports games), it is important to understand that in most cases, AI is not the core content creator for publishers. The massive value of AI is that it automates manual and repetitive processes, thereby freeing up time for humans on a team to devote to content creation or engaging with their community of followers. 

AI helps publishers manage and create content by serving as another member of the team. By automating with AI, publishers can streamline processes and automate certain procedural tasks without human involvement, freeing up time for human team members to focus on higher value work, whether that’s content creation, reporting, investigative journalism, engaging with readers or followers, or other time-intensive activities. This ultimately saves time, energy, and cost for the company as a whole. 

How do you see AI entering into influencer marketing?

I see AI as a true ally for influencers who are essentially content creators managing their own brand, business, followers and content. They’ve got to wear multiple hats — that of creator, editor, marketer, data analyst, community manager. 

AI can streamline and automate all these processes for influencers, whether that’s efficiently analyzing data sets to make decisions about which content will go viral or automatically posting the best content at the optimal time on each social platform for maximum visibility. AI and automation can not only save valuable time for influencers — they can also produce better results than humans by using real-time data to make decisions. 

What are some of the concerns with or shortcomings of AI-driven content?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are starting to become sophisticated, such as GPT-3, which can generate full and sometimes even coherent stories and is widely considered to be a breakthrough in the AI field. GPT-3 requires a prompt of a few lines in order to generate text, and — as with all AI algorithms — the output can be biased or of poor quality if the prompt itself includes biased or toxic language. When relying on AI-driven content, the input must be of excellent quality in order to achieve quality output, so this can naturally present a challenge. 

How do you expect to see this space evolve over the next few years?

AI adoption is picking up pace as businesses increasingly lean on AI to both enhance performance and save on resources. I think we’ll see this trend accelerate over the next few years as AI begins to play a larger role in daily activities across the business, and both decision-makers and end users alike recognize the value of automation. 

In terms of social media influencers, I believe automation will become a part of every influencer’s workflow once they realize the immediate time and performance gains that AI can offer when packaged in a user-friendly tool.