Is Your AI Content Strategy Making Your Audience Dumber? A New Study Has Answers.

[Dopious]

just came across a fascinating cognitive science study that has some serious implications for how we use AI in marketing. Researchers looked at how LLMs, like ChatGPT, affect the brain during essay writing compared to using a search engine or just the good old human brain.

The results were pretty startling. The group using LLMs showed the least brain activity. Their writing was homogenous, and they had poor recall of what they'd written. They even reported a low sense of ownership over the final text.

This got me thinking about our own marketing efforts. Are we over-relying on AI to generate our blog posts, social media updates, and ad copy? The study suggests this could lead to a "sameness" in our content that fails to create a unique brand voice or a lasting impression. If users show weaker neural engagement with AI-assisted content, are our messages truly landing?

The most interesting part was that people who first drafted ideas themselves and then used AI showed increased brain engagement. This suggests the sweet spot for AI might be as a creative partner for ideation, not a replacement for human creativity.

What are your thoughts? How are you balancing the efficiency of AI with the need for authentic, memorable content that builds a real connection with your audience? Are we risking our brand's unique voice for the sake of speed?

Study Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872

 

[t2van]

The most interesting part was that people who first drafted ideas themselves and then used AI showed increased brain engagement. This suggests the sweet spot for AI might be as a creative partner for ideation, not a replacement for human creativity.

This is probably exactly how we use it.

We have our own data sets and topics provide as much information as we can and then get the AI to expand on it from outside sources, format the data and present it all including all relevant styling (because the way our platform is set up we sometimes need to have custom html tags, it's annoying) but GPT takes that down to seconds vs 5min per article editing.

Once we have what wanted created. We tend to use AI as a jumping off point to explore similar ideas and topics based on what was just written.

We take those and again format our own data, products, knowledge into snippets and pump that back in.

I can't remember the last time we just trusted it to write something - although that's a lie now I type this out the only time we use pure AI is when we craft meta descriptions.

 

[SirTop]

The study suggests this could lead to a "sameness" in our content that fails to create a unique brand voice or a lasting impression

At one point last year, I actually believed that human created content would make a big comeback in 2025.

Because at that time, I thought AI was running out of fresh material to learn from with the kind of output I was getting from it (maybe I could have prompted better actually )