Ch. 18: AI drafts vs $0.08/word writers

Ch. 18: AI drafts vs $0.08/word writers

My personal-finance-adjacent budgeting site, 2024. I ran an honest A/B over 6 months. Batch A: 25 posts AI-drafted then lightly edited, cost ~$4 each in tokens and 20 min editing. Batch B: 25 posts from a $0.08/word writer, ~$95 each.

After the March core update, Batch A lost 41% of its traffic. Batch B lost 9%. The difference wasn't 'quality' you could see on the page — both read fine. It was that the human writer added two real product mistakes she'd made, a screenshot, a number from her own bank. AI couldn't fabricate lived experience, and the update rewarded exactly that.

I now use AI for structure and research, humans for anything claiming experience.

Lesson banked: AI content survives until an update that hunts for experience signals. Pay humans for the parts a model can't have lived.