This research explores how digital content professionals—mainly journalists and marketers—perceive and adapt their writing process using generative AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai. We designed an online survey to probe how digital editors assess the impact of these two different interfaces on their creative process, classifying them into three groups: augmented, frustrated, and indifferent. The first two groups can be compared to the famous “apocalyptic and integrated” dichotomy (Eco, 1964), which describes the extremes of reactions to new technologies. We conducted our research in two steps. Our first survey, involving 130 participants from various fields, reveals diverse perceptions of AI’s impact on content creation: 72% of respondents feel augmented by AI tools, 20% indifferent, and only 8% frustrated. The analysis highlights significant differences in collaboration frequency across application domains (p-value: 0.0111) and generations (p-value: 0.0164). Perceptions of AI’s positive impact also vary significantly across application domains (p-value: 0.0358). In a second phase, 12 respondents were asked to perform the same writing task, first using a chatbot and second using a hybrid tool halfway between a conversational bot and a search engine. Subsequently, they evaluated the differences between the two writing experiences and the quality of the support provided by the different AI tools. Our qualitative analysis of this brief “AI writing test” shows that participants mostly preferred ChatGPT for creative tasks due to its iterative brainstorming capabilities, while Perplexity.ai was favoured for research-oriented tasks because of the structured, fact-based responses and keyword suggestions it provides. We aim to provide a nuanced understanding of AI tools’ dual-edged impact, balancing efficiency and quality improvements with job market implications. Our findings support the initial hypothesis that the hybridization of search engines and conversational interfaces may offer significant value, enabling content professionals to leverage the strengths of both tools for a more comprehensive and efficient content creation process.