Entrepreneurs Varun Mayya and Viraj Sheth shed light on effective use of AI in the content business

Artificial intelligence will soon replace humans. 

AI will take your job away. 

The above statements and similar ones have been making headlines in the last couple of years. And with the advent of  OpenAI’s ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), conversations have now steered towards the ability of AI to create and refine content on any topic, in any language or style, leading to the question: Can AI replace content creators?

At TechSparks 2023, YourStory’s flagship event, which celebrated the Great Indian Techade, Manish Pandey, consultant to content companies and coach to content creators, got two experts to shed light on this pertinent question and how content creation can evolve in the age of AI. 

Is ChatGPT a cliche? 

ChatGPT may be the talk of the town but it tends to be generic, opined content creators. 

“As a content piece on Instagram, ChatGPT has become a cliche,” said Varun Mayya, entrepreneur and AI content creator. 

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However, he added, “The technology is going to keep progressing, it is never going to sleep … And its penetration is going to improve.”

Viraj Sheth, Co-founder & CEO, Monk Entertainment, a digital media organisation, is of the opinion that AI-generated content is “generic” in nature. 

“It is not because ChatGPT is not advanced but because people are not creative enough to put the right prompts,” he explained.

Sheth believes content creators should use AI to generate more ideas and present their viewpoint in a “unique way”, which includes their voice, image, tonality and behaviour.

“In content (business), you can’t fake it till you make it, but you can make it and then fake it,” Mayya pointed out. 

That is, once a creator understands what people want to watch or read, they can use AI to automate or create new content based on the consumers’ preferences. Producing video content using ChatGPT may also be useful for creators as it will help save research time.

“But if you are just starting out and putting a million generic tweets on it, nobody’s gonna read it,” he explained. 

AI-led threats

In 2021, the internet was shaken by a roundtable discussion featuring Tom Cruise, George Lucas, Robert Downey Jr, Jeff Goldblum and Ewan McGregor, on streaming wars and the future of cinema. Only, the video was made using deepfake technology (manipulation of facial appearance through deep generative methods).

Similarly, Mayya was recently seen in a video where he had dubbed his voice to sound like Elon Musk and Morgan Freeman. 

These are examples of synthetically developed videos made using AI. While it has been all fun and games until now, the prospect of AI being able to impersonate someone to the T might become problematic in future. 

“Theoretically it is content theft … But I think we will build an immune system. Eventually all of us will hear something and wonder if it’s authentic,” Mayya prophesied. 

He further explained that, while one can use AI to impersonate an artist or musician, human behaviour is such that a true fan will continue to pay to attend concerts of the real artist. 

“AI is still not hurting their (creator’s) content monetisation. I think celebrities and politicians are more scared of identity theft since they are the first target,” Sheth said. 

Putting AI to good use

Despite the looming threats of impersonation and identity theft, AI can actually be put to productive use, agreed Mayya and Sheth.

Sheth said content creators are consistently using AI tools for scripting and translating their content into other languages.

“From a scalability standpoint, this use case can take creators to the moon, till to the point where it does not feel forcefully dubbed,” he added. 

Mayya said content creators in the personal finance space should make use of ChatGPT to brainstorm new ideas. 

Can AI replace human content creators?

Finally, Pandey urged the experts to share their opinion on the all-important question of whether AI will replace humans in the business of content creation.

“I don’t think it will ever happen. Especially for business-related content,” said Mayya. “There is a principal agent problem–loyalty is still at the personal brand level.” 

When a business hires a creator for content marketing and it clicks, it is actually the creator’s personal brand that’s growing. 

To fix this, Sheth suggested that businesses and brands invest in multiple hosts to manage different IPs. 

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket and then scale. Dependency should not be on one person,” he added. 

He backed his suggestion with the example of Nykaa, a brand that has used its marketing employees to double up as influencers and shoot content. 

“Different hosts working on different IPs on the brand’s channel will allow the focus to be on the brand itself,” said Sheth.