Introduction
In the fast-paced world of content creation, a burning question looms:
**Human freelancers or AI—who’s your real MVP?**
It’s a dilemma keeping CMOs and marketing heads tossing and turning, weighed down by costs, quality, and innovation choices.
AI is spicing things up with its lightning speed and budget-friendly options, but can it match the unique flair of a seasoned freelancer?
**Join Might As Well**, the insightful founder of Montanus, as he dives into the sparks flying between AI and freelance writers!
With his savvy experience in high-knowledge B2B marketing, he breaks down must-know factors:
– Delivery speed
– Quality control
– Future-proofing your strategy
– Optimizing your precious time
So, will AI turbocharge your workflows, or will that human touch take the crown in content production?
**Hit play to find out!** Transform your content strategy with insights that could change the game!
What You’ll Learn
• How to balance cost efficiency between AI and freelancers
• Speed advantages of AI in content production
• Evaluating quality: AI vs. human touch
• Future-proofing content strategies with freelancers
• Managing your time with AI and freelancers
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Welcome to the content universe! Today I want to talk about something that I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the the recent couple of days and it is of course I’m not of course but it is whether you should choose freelancers human freelancers over AI and especially in in content writing this is what I’ve been struggling a little bit with or the pros and cons of each so freelancers versus AI humans versus AI solutions because nowadays the AI is really really powerful there’s no denying that my name is might as well and I’m the writer and founder of Montanus which is a content production company and we work for mainly high-end or high knowledge companies in the business-to-business world and help them create podcasts, blog posts, social media posts, etc. Now one of the considerations that we have internally at Montana’s is of course whether we should use an AI service for producing some of the content or at least first draft content or we should outsource some of it to freelancers But also whether we should hire an in-source and then get it done by someone in-house and today I really want to talk about this distinct features and the distinct possibilities with using AI versus using a freelancer. Now obviously the first and most obvious reason to use say AI would be price. So using an AI to create your content to produce the text that you need produced, to write the blog post, to create the social media post. The price of using AI is just a lot lower than even the cheapest freelancer because even the cheapest freelancer will still cost you If you go really cheap you can probably find someone at like $10 an hour but having a monthly subscription to say ChatGPT or any of the other content or large language models that will cost you about $20-25 dollars per month. So obviously, going for the AI solution when we are talking strictly price is going the cheapest option and the best option. Now there are four other things that I really need to take into consideration and that I’ve considered quite a lot in this choice between freelancer and AI. The four things that I want to go through today is first of all speed of delivery I want to go through a bit of quality, I want to talk about future proofing your structure, your model, your business, your way of doing it and then fourth your own time. Now starting with the first one speed of delivery here we have a situation where AI absolutely wins because what I found last time actually when I was looking up freelancers for helping me write blogposts what I really found was that I had quite a lot of back and forth with that freelancer and there are a bit of you know some feedback rounds and I that time I used a freelancer in the Philippines so we also had the time difference to take into consideration so that means that maybe the freelancer gave me a final draft or whatever it’s called like a final version and then I would feedback on that but then only next day the freelancer would be able to oh they’ll be in the night so the freelancer would be able to send back to me but I would have it the next day whereas if I used an AI I could give the feedback right away and then you know 10 seconds later I’ll have a new version of that same text that I was working on. So in terms of speed of delivery, AI absolutely wins but there is a catch in that catch is my point number four which we’ll come back to. So that’s one thing to take into consideration, how fast do you actually need the delivery to be? One trick in using freelancers that that I’ve come across, have actually introduced to me, what’s his name…. oh that’s gone…. Andrew Gray. Andy Gray. Andy Gray. I was like what…. Andy Gray from the Grey Agency. I looked him up. He’s really cool. Follow him on on LinkedIn as well. He’s quite active. Andy Gray. Sorry about that, your name was just completely gone. Anyway, so a trick that he told me was, instead of using a freelancer that is so much outside your own time zone that you have this something that you need to take into consideration. Find a freelancer that is more or less in your own time zone, plus minus, maybe one or two hours because that means that the cooperation, or the collaboration with that freelancer, chatting back and forth it is so much quicker because they will reply, you know, minutes after rather than hours after. So, that is one thing to take into consideration when choosing a freelancer and still wanting that a little bit of speed of delivery and smoothness of cooperation. If you choose something that’s further out of your own time zone, I would probably suggest that you first get accustomed to working with freelancers and then first, when you know how to do that and when you’re really good at it you can start choosing someone who is outside or, like, way outside your own time zone, because of the, asynchronous? Asynchronous? I don’t even know that word. You know what I mean, that because of the The difference in communication. Alright so that was speed of delivery. Then we have quality as my other concern. And quality, I think in the beginning of the AI era in saying, like, November 2022, I think. In the beginning, there was light. No in the beginning obviously freelancers still had a real edge on AI in terms of quality. Now quite soon with the introduction of GPT-4s rather than 3.5s. So with the introduction of fours. That quality they kind of are the AI’s kind of started to you know, get closer to something that looks like neck-and-neck. And I still think that we’re getting closer and closer. But there is still something about the AI texts that just somehow feels a little bit mechanical. So in terms of quality I really think that if you find good freelancers and and let me stress good freelancers are really great freelancers that quality is still quite a lot better than what you would get from an AI. They are also quite a lot more expensive but that trade-off can sometimes be a real good, good thing to take still. So choosing freelancers that are really good, that also means that they are a little bit more… They can work by themselves a bit more, they don’t need so much supervision from you which is absolutely a benefit that is worth stressing. So quality wise, neck and neck right now. I would say especially if you don’t take like the highest end freelancers and you don’t… you know… You also obviously need to pay for the Pro versions of the AI because otherwise you won’t get the newest models and all that. Just keep in mind that AI will still take some of your time. It still does require human eyes to kind of de-machinize the texts and the stuff you get out of it. Whereas freelancers are… You can instruct them better and they will be… Well, human in their, in just the way that they write by themselves. One thing to do look out for, I think, is when you can see that a freelancer is using AI. That can both be something that is… That can be the best of both worlds, but it can also be the worst of both worlds. Because you can get a faster freelancer that keeps the human quality and the human touch to the text that you get. But you could also… But you also do risk getting a slow version of just using the AI yourself. A slow and expensive version that is. So quality is definitely something to look out for. Now the third point is future-proofing and future-proofing the structure of how you do things. This is actually something that I think is a bigger issue than people tend to acknowledge. So what I’ve found is really that when I’ve introduced an AI system or an AI service into producing some kind of content I’ve maybe made a system and that system can just be, you know, a prompt library where we copy-paste prompts in and out, but it could also be something more profound whether we have API integrations going back and forth into different systems. Now this is really cool that you can do this with AI, but what I really found is that when you use AI for this sort of thing you kind of it gets really hard for you to keep on staying at top or staying in the game in terms of, you know, using the latest models it could be using the best the best AI tool available right now, for quite a long time ChatGPT has been up there at one of the front players but in some sense ChatGPT is also a little bit hyped because they’re basically running the AI show publicly but when you go into more niche topics, if you want specifically content writing, if you want specific AI for say product management there are also some other tools that leverage that same technology but because they’re just more niche, they’re actually doing a better job in performing whatever you’re doing and when we talk about content you obviously have content specific AI’s that are just really good at creating content whereas ChatGPT for instance is a general service so you’d have to instruct it every time. Every time the GPT changes you’d need to also probably change your prompts, you probably also need to change if you have something more structured more API based you want that changed as well so you have a new round of testing prompts you have a new round of setting up different systems so future-proofing with AI actually is a little bit harder and it’s a little bit harder than I would have thought a year ago, whereas when you choose freelancers as your source of input or your source of production so to say so so the way that you produce your content when you choose freelancers you would think that those freelancers that’s an unstable way of building a business however what you need to consider is the fact that many freelancers they live from being freelancers right so they the money that you pay the freelancers is that is actually their job and that is what they want to do as their job also in quite a long time into the future for the most parts so actually choosing a freelancer is often quite a stable way of creating a structure around your content production because that freelancer is dependent on you giving him or her projects so I think in terms of future-proofing the structure of how you produce content I think freelancers is a more stable option whereas AI may be the way of the future but as long as we see the development going so fast as it does it right now and I don’t really see any reason why the speed of development should you know fall too much you know ai’s just require more attention it requires more attention to what GPT using to what service you’re using to what version and also actually even just staying with the same version science has I don’t know if it’s science but you know studies have shown that GPT’s do get a little bit lazy as they get older so actually the quality of those answers that you get even though you still keep the same language model the same version of the language model it will actually be worse and worse quality which I would argue is the opposite when you use a freelancer so that’s one thing to also consider how you want to food to prove the structure and off of your production and then of course the last thing and I would say this is probably one of the most important things to consider is how to manage your own time because often what what using an AI service means is that you can cut down a lot of hours doing trivial tasks doing first drafts all this you can actually cut down quite a lot of time but you can never cut down everything and that is actually a really important point because as the need for content grows and it grows together with the accessibility of AI because as the use of AI grows the number of say blog posts published everyday increases rapidly exponentially even so if you want to keep up the pace your content productions should also should also speed up so instead of having one blog post a week you would probably want to have like three blog posts a week or even one per day just to kind of keep up with with competition so this means that even though AI helps you cut down on time spent on each article or each social media posts the need for creating more posts is so imminent that in the end you might not you might not actually save any time at all your output would just be a bit higher but if you need that time for something more important for a strategic work for for whatever else project management leadership all those things you would still probably want to consider using freelancer to manage all this and then that freelancer in turn can then use AI to kind of get the best of both worlds, hopefully, because when you find the good freelancer, that freelancer will also hopefully at some point know you know your business so well that you actually don’t actually that you don’t need to spend any time feedback-ing, you don’t need to spend time instructing and criticizing and all of these things, of course this takes a little bit of a little bit of work to get there but I think it’s really worth considering so AI does indeed save you time but it is still, it still does take time for you and from your calendar, so if your time is sparse and very valuable you would probably still want to consider using a freelancer. Alright so those were four I guess five if you count in the the price as well so five different things that you should really think about before choosing whether to use an AI or use a freelancer for your content production so the price obviously, the speed of delivery, the quality, the future proofing of your content structure, content production structure and of course, last but not least, how you want to manage your own time and how valuable your own time is. Alright that is the content universe for today and if you have any questions hit me up at podcast at montanus dot co and that was podcast at montanus dot co and let me know what you think, give us a rating in your podcast player, give us a comment, can you comment on the players? I would really love to hear from you. It would it’ll be great so yeah please please do reach out and see you next time in the content universe!