The Role of generative AI in Content Generation: An empirical case study

The rise and rapid improvement of Artificial Intelligence are opening the doors for new business opportunities. One of the business sectors in which AI has the most potential is digital marketing, particularly in the social media marketing business, thanks to generative AI-powered tools. These tools, when implemented correctly, can help the company decrease production costs, increase content effectiveness, and reduce content production time. This thesis aims to understand the impact and the effectiveness that AI-powered tools and generative AI technologies have on enhancing the average engagement levels of content and how they impact content production speed. As of November 2024, a limited number of empirical studies compare AI-generated and human-generated content in the social media marketing field. The empirical case study conducted in this thesis consisted of two sections. The first section had the objective of verifying the hypothesis that, by using AI-powered tools, the content production time can be reduced. This section consisted of the creation of 40 human-generated videos and 10 AI-generated videos, measuring the production time for each. The second section aims to verify the hypothesis that AI-generated content performs better on social media regarding reach and engagement than human-generated content. In this section, 40 human-generated videos and 10 AI-generated videos were uploaded to three different social media platforms. The measured variables included views, reach, interactions, watch time, and new followers generated. The results of the first section of the case study found a decrease in production time of 15.03% when using AI-powered tools. However, a considerable learning curve was also found, evidenced by the fact that in the second half of this section, the production time decreased to 28.72%. The results of the second section found that AI-generated content generates, on average, 8.57% more views. It also emerged that AI-generated content leads to 41.96% more new followers than human-generated content. Therefore, AI-generated content has a 31.03% higher new follower-per-view ratio. It was also found that some social media platforms favour AI-generated content more than others. Marketers should consider implementing AI-powered tools in their content production, as this implementation has clear strategic advantages. However, they must also pay attention to limitations, like the need to increase employee AI training, and ethical concerns, like potential copyright issues and the general feeling of mistrust of the general public towards AI-generated content.