Human Uses Curiosity Hook to Beat AI
42sShows a real-time strategy of crafting a curiosity-driven social media post, contrasting human creativity with AI's generic output.
▶ Play Clip"Title accurately promises a head-to-head battle and delivers the winner – no fluff or bait-and-switch."
In this competition, a human digital marketing expert (Ryan) faces off against ChatGPT across three challenges: creating a social media post, writing a Google ad, and crafting a blog post for an Italian chef's online cooking course. The expert wins two out of three challenges, demonstrating the value of human creativity and authenticity over AI-generated content.
Ryan, a digital marketing expert, competes with ChatGPT (operated by Liz) in three marketing challenges for an Italian chef's cooking course. Judges vote blindly on which output is better.
The challenge is to create a social media post for the chef. Ryan focuses on authenticity using a 'curiosity hook' and avoids hashtags, while ChatGPT generates multiple hashtags but produces clip-art-like graphics.
All judges prefer Ryan's post (number two) because it feels authentic and less like a hard sell, unlike ChatGPT's post which is too salesy.
Writing a Google search ad with headline and description constraints. Ryan manually brainstorms ideas, while ChatGPT generates options quickly but includes repeated words like 'Italian' three times.
Both judges pick ChatGPT's ad because it is more direct and fits the Google ad format better, though one judge notes Ryan's ad could be mistaken for food delivery.
Ryan uses keyword research tools (HFS Keywords Explorer) to identify search terms, then writes a detailed blog post with techniques, internal links, and a soft pitch. ChatGPT produces a fluffy post with basic recipes and a hard pitch.
Judges unanimously prefer Ryan's blog post for its storytelling, authenticity, and educational value, while criticizing ChatGPT's post as generic and overly excited.
Ryan wins the competition 2-1. Judges conclude that while AI is good for short copy like Google ads, human creativity and authenticity are crucial for long-form content and social media.
The human digital marketing expert outperformed ChatGPT in two of three challenges, proving that while AI can assist with short-form copy and data analysis, human intuition, storytelling, and authenticity remain essential for effective marketing.
Why did the judges prefer the human's social media post over ChatGPT's?
It felt more authentic and less like a hard sales pitch, creating a curiosity hook rather than a direct sell.
05:36
What is a key downside of using too many hashtags in social media posts?
It looks and feels like marketing, which is the opposite of the authentic vibe desired.
03:57
In the Google ad challenge, why did ChatGPT's ad win?
It was more direct and fit the Google ad format better, while the human's ad was slightly ambiguous.
09:28
What technique did the human use to optimize the blog post for SEO?
He used keyword research tools (HFS Keywords Explorer) to find low-difficulty, high-volume keywords and targeted them in headings.
11:16
How did the judges describe ChatGPT's blog post writing style?
It was 'fluffy', with perfect grammar but predictable sentences, basic recipes, and a hard pitch lacking storytelling.
15:00
What was the final score of the competition?
The human won 2 challenges (social media and blog post) vs. ChatGPT's 1 win (Google ad).
16:39
Curiosity Hook Strategy
Demonstrates an effective social media technique: start with an intriguing statement to stop the scroll.
00:45Authenticity Over Sales
Judges emphasize that social media content should not feel like a hard sell; authenticity drives engagement.
05:36Keyword Research for SEO
Shows practical SEO workflow: identify low-competition keywords and incorporate them into headings.
11:16Human Storytelling Wins
Long-form content benefits from narrative and personal touch, which AI currently lacks.
15:00[00:03] years of experience in digital marketing battles with total beginner supercharged with AI I have zero years of digital marketing experience they'll face off across three challenges and our expert judges won't know who created what until
[00:17] after they vote this is way harder than I thought it's human versus machine in a battle for marketing Supremacy my entire career and livelihood and uh job is on the line with this hey Liz lovely to meet you and and apologies that I have
[00:31] to destroy you you see there is more at stake here than just my fragile little ego as far as I'm concerned I'm fighting for The Souls of marketing creatives for The Souls of marketing creatives everywhere oh my God okay Ryan wish you
[00:45] everywhere oh my God okay Ryan wish you best of luck let the games begin in this competition you are a digital marketer hired by a famous Italian chef the chef's main product is an online course teaching people how to cook his
[00:58] signature Italian dishes create a post for the Italian Chef's social media feed you have 30 minutes to complete the challenge clock starts [Music] now potential starting line I've cooked
[01:11] thousands of Italian dishes and one still stumps me so we've introduced a kind of curiosity hook at this point hopefully people will care about that as they're scrolling through a feed can you create a social media graphic for
[01:26] create a social media graphic for me oh my God okay something's loading we want this post to feel like it's from an Italian Nona it's her deepest darkest secret nobody else has access to this privileged information you know act
[01:40] quickly to get this PDF recipe in exchange for that I think we do something useful for this website we can probably ask for an email address or a probably ask for an email address or a reshare or something like that oh
[01:52] wow this is hilarious I mean it's cool that like AI is producing these Graphics but they are feeling a little bit like the clip art that we used to use in word
[02:04] I'm going to play around with a little with it a little bit really would help if I could spell ravioli I'm I Will Learn by the end of this exercise ravioli this text it just doesn't feel
[02:18] ravioli this text it just doesn't feel super authentic it doesn't read well to me master the art of Italian cooking school now and then I think we can probably uh really Hammer this home by listing some of the explicit benefits
[02:31] that you will earn through downloading this recipe you'll learn the secrets to this recipe you'll learn the secrets to Silky pasta dough my top tip for Umami rich bges and the one cooking tip I wish I'd known a decade earlier I like it but
[02:46] I'd known a decade earlier I like it but I don't love it so I made a few edits to this I've taken out a few words that might trigger some people and thinking visit the secret page that was I think a bit Overkill I think the thing I want to
[02:59] do now is uh dig out a really great looking uh ravioli picture this is definitely an area now where AI has a huge Advantage because if you are so inclined you can generate amazing really mouthwatering food images or product
[03:14] photography or even images of people and the only thing you have to watch out for is occasional deformed hands or strange faces in the background it looks like it says Master the art of palian Cooking School lots of
[03:30] um errors in this graphic I'm not feeling super great about this right now how much time do I have no we found a few pictures uh some of them look uh no offense to this person but that looks pretty terrible I wouldn't eat that uh
[03:44] this one looks good I think we're playing into this authenticity this sense of uh of secrecy around cooking I reckon this could perform well I like reckon this could perform well I like this okay beautiful now let's work on
[03:57] the caption I didn't include any hashtags in this I didn't include any hashtags in this post for the simple reason that it looks and feels like marketing when people do that and that is the opposite Vibe we
[04:10] want to cultivate here AI will do 50 hashtags uh and they'll all be terrible # Italian cooking #y pasta # cooking glasses # virtual cooking all right where did these
[04:23] where did these hashtags come from are they frequently searched so so you know most social media posts use hashtags generative AI will use hashtags but the problem with any best practice is the
[04:36] more people do it the less effective it becomes so actually a lot of good social media is doing things that are slightly unusual becoming pattern interrupting unusual becoming pattern interrupting things that deviate from the status quo
[04:48] things that deviate from the status quo rework the caption to be attention grabbing dreaming of mastering authentic Italian dishes that feels if I I don't like dreaming for some reason okay honestly I like the original that AI
[05:03] gave me I'm going to go with that seeing as I'm almost out of time homemade pasta cooking classes virtual cooking authentic Italian Nina's kitchen
[05:19] pasta lovers learn to cook I've cooked thousands of Italian dishes but one thousands of Italian dishes but one still stumps me ravioli easy let's do it still stumps me ravioli easy let's do it all right ready one two three go number
[05:36] all right ready one two three go number two yes yes number two number two was hands down better yeah I think the first one was just a hard sales fish but the intent on social media isn't so much to buy or to join a $100 cooking class and
[05:53] so without any warm-up conversion rates would be extremely low now in marketing people really want some authenticity so everything is the same and if everything is the same and everybody is an artist and no one is an artist then a lot of
[06:05] valuable things get lost an ad's job is to be catchy enough to get clicks and bring in the Right audience write copy for a Google ad that audience write copy for a Google ad that will get people to click on the chef's
[06:19] course you have 15 minutes to complete the challenge clock starts now that's not a lot of time and uh in some ways the shorter the marketing copy is the harder it is to write if AI was going to beat me
[06:34] challenge look like there's some different types of ads okay I will just go with the search ad these ads appear at the top of Google searches results with this format we'll do a headline a description 30 characters and then 90
[06:50] characters and that will be our constraint I like that AI is telling me that there's like a 30 character Max limit I did not know that let's see how connect as this is see this is the kind of area where I think AI would be quite
[07:03] helpful it doesn't always follow these rules but when it does you can just tell it to limit the ideas it generates to 30 characters or 90 characters you don't have to do any of this manual laborious character counting rate me a Google ad
[07:17] for nalina cooking course I'm just starting by writing out the objective in front of me very good to always keep this front of mind for this type of copy we have have an end goal that we want to get to
[07:31] service of that end goal so they've come up with these three headlines for me is this incorporating the most incorporating the most effective SEO words let's refine the ad
[07:45] copy to ensure we're maximizing its SEO potential beautiful general rule it's a good idea to delete repeated words if you're looking for word economy and the word Italian three times in that description is probably plenty okay so
[08:01] now it almost feels like the SEO words are like really being forced in and it just doesn't feel super like authentic but then again I don't know if Google ads need it to be super authentic I'm about halfway through time and I'm
[08:15] feeling pretty good actually I've been brainstorming a bunch of ideas and I find these interesting I would probably click some of these so I think that's a right direction dropping it into the challenge beautiful I definitely
[08:29] psyched myself out a little bit Yeah doing this it's so hard to know with advertising this is where AI may have the edge if it comes up with a gillion the edge if it comes up with a gillion different options we will
[08:45] best food in your kitchen descriptions online Italian cookery course taught by a pro Chef Master authentic Italian dishes online pasta course taught by a pro Chef learn the secrets of authentic Italian online F course taught by a pro
[09:00] Chef virtual Italian cooking classes for beginners and food lovers cook Italian food from home call to action enroll now or sign up today it's tough oh yeah you were right it is harder there's less context yeah yeah yeah which makes it
[09:15] harder which I think it makes AI actually great at they're starting to Jumble together for me yeah all right all right you ready ready 1 2
[09:28] all right you ready ready 1 2 3 we both chose two which is AI right 3 we both chose two which is AI right I'm going to say it is AI oh wow no I didn't know that I knew that it was AI it was it was very clear that it was AI
[09:42] why the second one was more direct and with a Google ad I think that you do need to be a little bit more direct so also if you if you block the third if you look at the first one from Ryan Italy's best food in your kitchen
[09:55] ravioli noi kacho Pepe it could be an ad delivery Italian food delivery like green Chef or whatever yeah I think that AI is very good for for writing these short ads like Google ads I think that
[10:09] means rest in peace add copywriters I'm just kidding I'm just an ad copywriter like that's not where my expertise is and so like maybe they would look at Ryan and say like that's
[10:23] 20 times better write a blog post to drive traffic to the chef's website you you have 2 hours to complete the challenge clock starts now okay 2 hours seems like a long time to write a blog post so
[10:36] generally 2 hours is not very long to write a good uh search optimize blog post uh at least that's not very long for a human to do it so I'm asking chat BT what are people searching for when learning to cook Italian
[10:49] food looks like number one is classic Italian recipes okay I'm going to say of Italian recipes okay I'm going to say of these which is the most popular search how to make pasta from scratch okay CH GPT just keeps giving me searches we're
[11:04] at eight now okay they gave me eight I just had an idea as I was uh outlining I want to cover the specific recipes techniques uh so why don't I dump those
[11:16] into HFS keywords Explorer to see if there are related longtail variations of this that I can talk about and include and maybe get a extra bit of search volume uh off the back of this article now all of these already have a great
[11:30] volume so I think uh it's important to include these a little bit too high considering our website but something like how to make ru seems very promising okay oh no you've hit the free plan limit for
[11:44] no you've hit the free plan limit for chat GPT responses will use another model until your limit resets so what we're going to do is have a look at uh any versions of this that we should definitely include and what we can can
[11:59] do is we can filter uh keyword difficulty down to something more manageable for us so let's say 30 and let's put in the lowest Dr let's put in the lowest Dr filter 30 so websites that have a domain
[12:13] filter 30 so websites that have a domain rating of 30 or less show up in the top five search results for all of these keywords so that means if we target these there's a very good chance that we will rank as well since I'm going to
[12:26] will rank as well since I'm going to make pasta kind of the theme of this make pasta kind of the theme of this blog post write me a blog post about blog post write me a blog post about pasta for an online Italian cooking
[12:38] pasta for an online Italian cooking school ooh love it mastering the art of pasta a beginner's guide cute I like it so one concern that I have right off the so one concern that I have right off the bat is just like where is chat PT
[12:52] getting this from I mean I don't I don't want to plagiar eyes have to make pasta sauce with tomato paste not very authentic don't think we're going to include that one H how to make Italian tomato sauce that's a good one 100
[13:06] searches a month 17 keyword difficulty informational intent so I'll probably either work these just into the text as I write or I may even include them as H3 natural way of covering this information Google tends to weight information in
[13:21] headers slightly more highly than it does in other parts of the uh article does in other parts of the uh article text are there any errors in this blog post okay let's go over step by step to ensure there's no errors uh let's add
[13:36] the apostrophe I will say is this part's a little time consuming like every time I make an edit it just rewrites the article one of the directions here is salt the water I've never heard that
[13:48] add salt to the water I'm just going to ask is salt the water a common phrase commonly used in cooking context okay to make it more clear we could
[14:02] revise it as generously salt the water yes let's revise it thank you 1 hour to go I want to write these next two sections try and get a couple of images and spend a bit of time on the title I am really happy with this blog post I'm
[14:16] am really happy with this blog post I'm going to copy and paste it okay going to copy and paste it okay [Music]
[14:30] that 30 seconds left my goodness we have a whole article we've covered uh three fundamental Italian cooking techniques so Frito Ru and a nice tomato sauce uh I we've got loads of great subtopics got internal links uh external links got
[14:46] title tag we've got we've got a nice call to action at the end I even found some Creative Commons imagery that we could include just to make this look a bit better and bit less of a wall of text fingers crossed we will have to see
[15:00] how this goes good luck Chad GPT I think you're going to need it for this ultimate guide to Italian cooking all right that's number one number two
[15:13] Master the three fundamental Italian cooking techniques I know which one I cooking techniques I know which one I like better tfold do you yeah okay one like better tfold do you yeah okay one two 3 go C we both chose two
[15:29] two 3 go C we both chose two yes good job very very obvious yes did you know yeah the writing is very fluffy it doesn't really get into authentic real stuff it gives like the most basic recipes but not fundamental recipes and
[15:45] another thing also is that every sentence you know where it's going right yeah the grammar is almost perfect but in the other one it's more about storytelling and more poetic I don't really feel like I could learn anything
[15:57] from this like I don't think that I to master the art of pasta this person used 11 exclamation points but the question is always for me is it really that
[16:09] exciting the second thing is that the pitch at the end of the blog post was a hard pitch for the Italian cooking school and I'm personally of the belief that you should try to bring them in with a soft grasp and in the end there
[16:23] was also a really giveaway it said something about don't worry I've got you every time I hear it this I get a little bit sick in my mouth the Moment of Truth has arrived our digital marketing Champion is oh thank
[16:39] Champion is oh thank God so Ryan you may have won this time but let's do this challenge again next year we'll see if AI is able to learn and adapt and humanize itself a bit more to be the best digital marketer
⚡ Saved you 0h 16m reading this? Transcribe any YouTube video for free — no signup needed.