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"Is AI really as good as a person?"
It’s the first question we hear about AI Tags, and it’s a fair one. For years, human taggers have been the gold standard. So we stopped debating and ran the test.
The result: on this test, AI Tags performed at the level of our best human experts.
In a blind test, reviewers couldn’t tell its work from theirs.
The setup: our best experts vs the machine
We picked a real client project and asked one question of every article: is it relevant to this client’s own themes and key messages?
On one side, the best experts we have, each working independently. On the other, AI Tags, working the same articles. No one saw anyone else’s answers.
The blind test
We handed all the results to reviewers with the labels stripped off and asked them to spot the AI.
They couldn’t.
The scoreboard
The numbers back it up. We measured agreement: how often two labelers made the same call on an article. We compared our experts with each other, and AI Tags with the experts.
In round one, AI Tags matched our experts as often as they matched each other (83% both ways). In round two, it agreed with them slightly more often (82%) than they agreed among themselves (72%).
The plot twist: experts disagree too
Our experts didn’t always agree with each other. Relevance is a judgement call, and even the best people see it differently. That means there is no single "right answer" for AI to copy, so the right question is whether AI Tags behaves like one of the experts. On this test, it did.
What happens when AI gets it wrong?
It will sometimes, just as people do. The difference is what happens next. Flag an incorrect decision and the data updates immediately, and you can use those corrections to tighten the tag definition.
The takeaway
Reviewers couldn’t tell AI Tags from our best experts, and the agreement numbers back that up. That means human-quality tagging across your coverage, at speed, with fresh results every day, and without anyone reading every article.
So is AI as good as a human? On this task, yes.
Can AI Tags beat a human?
The real question isn’t whether AI can match human experts. It’s whether it can go further.
Want to see how AI Tags and Advanced Searches perform on your own coverage? Book a demo.