You can’t scroll social media, check out your favorite blog, or stream the news without hearing about ChatGPT.
The Microsoft-backed OpenAI has exploded in popularity, garnering praise by many and admonishment by others.
While most news outlets have been focusing on the educational impact of ChatGPT on students and teachers, the business community has their eyes set on a far loftier set of priorities.
What does this mean for content? After all, content is king…right?
Website content, ad content, social media posts—the marketing world runs on content. So is ChatGPT going to make us marketers irrelevant?
In a word, no. However, our team is diving deep into the ChatGPT waters to test the capabilities of this new technology to see what is groundbreaking and what is just hype.
The Pros…
Developing New Ideas
Everyone has writer’s block from time to time. It doesn’t matter how good you are, every now and then everyone hits a mental block and needs to dig themselves out.
This is one area that ChatGPT thrives, giving you options for even the most basic ideas.
Imagine for a moment that your ecommerce store sells instruments.
You cater to new and experienced musicians and need to brainstorm some ideas for content that would inspire more young people to pick up an instrument, like the drums.
You can ask ChatGPT for topic ideas by typing “Give me some blog ideas about playing the drums that young people would like.”
Granted, none of these may hit the exact points you want to discuss, but you might find one or two that get the creative juices flowing.
In the next example, we will show you how to take one of these ideas and add some creative angles to get you closer to a subject that will inspire you and your audience.
Expanding Creativity
Let’s assume that you liked the idea of “How to Play Different Drumming Styles” – A guide for young drummers on how to play different styles of drumming, such as rock, jazz, and hip hop. It looks like it could apply to a wide range of younger readers, so let’s see how adding a few creative ideas can flesh out this title into something amazing.
Here are a couple of things we need: title options and different tones of voice. Let’s go! First, we are simply going to ask ChatGPT to “give me 5 variations on number 9,” and see what happens.
Now right off the bat, we can see that it is really hanging onto the word “young” because we used this word at the beginning.
But we could also use other words like kids, teens, Gen Z, etc. We are just going to ask ChatGPT to “not use the word young,” and see what happens.
With a little tweaking, we start to get some new options to work with. Now we want to make these sound more interesting.
So, that is exactly what we are going to do! Now we are going to ask ChatGPT to “make these sound more exciting and cool,” and see what happens.
We are talking about drumming here, which inherently has a coolness factor baked into it!
Now we’re talking!
We have gone from a nugget of an idea, and through chatting with ChatGPT, we have started to flesh out some cool and interesting-sounding ideas for our next piece of content.
And this isn’t just for blogs, we could use this idea for a video, an article, social media posts—whatever we want.
Time-Saving Possibilities
Let’s take the “Rock, Jazz, and Hip Hop Beats for Generation Z: The Ultimate Guide to Playing Different Styles” idea and get some options for discussion points. This is where things can get really interesting, and it all comes down to the USE CASE for this content.
We just want more ideas and different creative angles we could talk about, so we are going to ask for a blog outline. Yeah, that’s right. We are going beyond simple questions and answers—now we are going to ask for structure.
All we are going to do is ask for an “outline for number 2” and see how ChatGPT will break out this subject. If we get something good, we may have just saved a ton on time on ideation.
WOW!!!
Now, we could keep digging and trying to make things sound cooler, change up the audience focus, etc. But all in all, we took our tiny idea of “Give me some blog ideas about playing the drums that young people would like,” and massaged that idea into a format that we might be able to use.
As amazing (and dare we say fun) as all of this is, ChatGPT does have its limitations—many of them. But let’s check out a few of these limitations that you need to be aware of.
The Cons…
Breaking News?! Not Here
ChatGPT claims that its learnings are only based on information through mid-2021. While there have been many on Twitter claiming otherwise and posting screenshots of post-2021 responses, we need to take things with a grain of salt.
For example, if you wanted to add a little spice into your content about drumming by pulling in some breaking news, you are out of luck…
Content & Data Accuracy
We have found a slew of examples where ChatGPT just misses the mark on accuracy, sometimes the mistakes are minor, and other times it is just WAY off the mark.
This could be because ChatGPT is as much machine learning as it is AI, and bits of learning or even programming could just be missing context and is simply striving to provide an answer.
For example, you may be wanting to show examples of the best drummers, but without specifying the criteria you want these examples based on, you may not get the most accurate information.
So while technically the data may be correct, questions that may have subjective answers may not return the results you had in mind.
Context May Be Lacking
You may find that the context you are being given is too general to the point that “anyone could have written this for any brand.” And we completely agree.
Without adding a variety of qualifiers, contextual requests, and even keyword requests, the underlying context may not be what you are looking for.
There are basic things you can do, from telling ChatGPT to write from a different perspective (below) to actually trying to “program” ChatGPT with very specific parameters, but overall context is likely going to be something you will need to add yourself.
You can see that in this case, asking ChatGPT to write from a “first-person perspective” really did nothing to improve the context. In fact, it has specified that it is a “language model trained by OpenAI,” which we definitely would not want in our content.
At the end of the day, you can use ChatGPT for coming up with some fantastic ideas and information, but you should be using all of this and then fleshing out the finished product on your own.
Beyond ChatGPT
ChatGPT is simply a tiny part of the overall discussion surrounding the capabilities of AI. Already a steady stream of “AI-powered” services, ranging from video and ad creation to voiceover and landing page development, are flooding the digital ecosystem.
And this happens with every new trend—many will attempt to capitalize on it, while only a few will stand the test of time (even if that time frame is only a few months).
In fact, several of these supposed new services, upon signing up, will gift you with a “we are working to upgrade our systems” splash screen. Meaning they are bait and switching interested parties to get your information without even having a product on offer yet.
So should you invest time in all this AI noise? 100% yes.
There is no doubt that AI is soon going to change how the world works, how you interact with search engines, and who knows what else. We encourage everyone to test out platforms like ChatGPT now to see what they can do, test your own use cases, and see if there is more to the hype than meets the eye.