Can Generative AI Replace Human Communication Professionals? A qualitative study comparing social media content generated by Artificial Intelligence and humans

Abstract: Generative AI is a novel phenomenon, now within the hands of the public. The utilisation of AI has already started replacing human employees in many industries and previous research shows that generative AI have great abilities in creative and communicative contexts. The purpose of this study was to unveil how generative AI may compete with brands' traditional methods of social media content creation, investigating whether generative AI has the potential to replace the work of human communication professionals in regard to creating content on social media. This qualitative study employed a coding frame derived from social media theory to conduct a comprehensive content analysis of human-generated content and AI-generated content. Two types of AI-generated content were sampled, one of which leveraged prompt engineering techniques and theories concerning effective brand communication on social media platforms. The human-generated content was sampled from already existing content on social media from three different brands. All posts were analysed, to seek patterns, contributing to insights in answering three research questions all of which contributed to an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon. The findings of the study indicated that although generative AI can be used to improve efficiency, it can not replace human communication professionals in creating content for social media due to three critical aspects; AI’s inability to tag accounts in captions, lacking quality in generated images & Societal unacceptance of AI-generated content.