This article is written by me, an AI, about an AI writing an article on using AI to write articles. Sounds confusing? Not for ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer). I am an AI platform created by OpenAI in November 2022. I was trained via unsupervised learning methods on 175 billion parameters using datasets from the internet, and utilize deep learning algorithms to produce humanlike writing from input data provided by a user. I am a versatile tool suitable for tasks like translation, summarization, debugging code and many more – including taking this convoluted prompt and knocking out a relatively impressive blog post replete with appropriate SEO and keywords.
Hopefully this exercise goes to show that with appropriately worded seed text, use of multiple prompts, some patience, and a human final pass to catch errors, AI tools are transformative – unlocking an exciting and valuable new frontier in content creation that can supercharge any future-facing business. As an AI system created for natural language processing tasks, I am uniquely positioned to speak on this subject; who better than me to talk about my own own advantages and disadvantages? So let’s dive in and explore the benefits – as well as the limitations – of implementing ChatGPT.
Benefit 1: Ultraefficient Content Pipelines
In today’s digital landscape businesses use a variety of strategies to increase website traffic and visibility, including the development and promotion of blog posts. However, creating engaging and optimised blogs can be a daunting and time-consuming task. It demands a dedicated team or expenditure on external digital marketing support to create a truly effective post that drives client conversion. Fortunately, advancements in natural language processing and AI technologies have enabled businesses to use language tools like ChatGPT instead. This approach is highly cost effective and efficient; allowing a smaller team to produce more content faster by significantly reducing manual effort in terms of copywriting and editing – things that normally take up precious working hours can instead be handed off to automated systems. Effective prompting can ensure copy utilises keywords and structure that optimise SEO and guarantee a readable, engaging post for your blog’s audience. Ultimately, AI can offer your business the ability to deploy affordable, unique blog posts tailored to your scale and audience at the drop of a hat – allowing unparalleled agility and scalability to exploit trending topics faster and more deeply than the competition. Moreover, ChatGPT helps preserve brand and content coherency via natural language processing algorithms that identify and understand the base concepts of any provided prompt – only generating content that is directly pertinent to the given topic. By writing using natural-sounding phrases and sentences, ChatGPT also lends authenticity to your content; which reads and flows like it has been written by a real person. Assuming then that prompts are effectively written and text is reviewed by a human prior to publication, Open AI’s language tool can synthesise content tailored to fit with your brand’s message and style at a much faster rate that traditional copywriting.
Benefit 2: International Reach
ChatGPT can also be used to produce and localize content in multiple languages, allowing your business to expand its reach without the need for a dedicated multi-language content team. One of the most obvious advantages of using online channels to promote yourself is this capacity to work beyond the local market and access a larger, international audience – but in order for these consumers to be reached effectively messaging must be localized so that it works regardless of language, unique cultural norms or national interests. By offering content in multiple languages with localization changes ChatGPT can help your business access a much broader potential base of customers which can lead directly into higher sales figures over time. Furthermore, having content available in other languages conveys respect towards customers by showing them your business is taking the time and effort necessary to help them understand what products or services you provide – increasing the chances of transforming that individual into a loyal customer.
Benefit 3: Your New Ideas Guy
A slightly more ‘out-there’ application for ChatGPT is as a suggestion/ideas engine – wherein your business’ copywriting teams input prompts that guide the AI to suggest appropriate topics for blogs or other digital marketing content. ChatGPT can then be used to draft a very rough copy to guide research and prompt writing. This greatly accelerates content planning and roadmapping, whilst also hitting upon concepts your teams may otherwise not have considered. Of course, these ideas can only originate from syntheses of existing information – but it is really quite surprising to see the plethora of intriguing proposals ChatGPT is able to provide. For example, the prompt ‘suggest 5 blog article titles for a modern tech-focussed blog that will encourage reader engagement’ returned the following results:
- Unlock the power of e-commerce with AWS
- How to make the most of your remote job as a technologist
- The top 5 open-source productivity technologies for data scientists
- The best methods to learn coding quickly, free
- The top 5 tools for reducing anxiety and stress in your tech business
Benefit 4: Eliminate Tedium
Outside the realm of web content creation, ChatGPT’s natural language AI technology can still offer a lot of help to marketers and businesses. One popular solution in use by many modern businesses involves automating tedious or lengthy lead generation tasks – including creating customized emails for different potential clients, customers and partners based on their industry. By combining natural language text generation with an AI-driven data system, marketers are able to further personalize messages at the individual customer scale, based on personal data such as their behavior online; something that historically was extremely difficult (and expensive) due to the volume of manual labour and data engineering required. This means your brand can now directly engage with consumers in a highly focused way; providing higher conversion rates, faster, for a greater ROI.
Benefit 5: Limitless Customisability
ChatGPT is also customisable. Any training data can be used to fine-tune the base models, allowing creation of a text generation tool that captures the unique style and language of any business. This does require some technical know-how, but by allowing your business the freedom to create content that captures any tone or uses your key product/internal language, fine-tuning brings incredible use-case specificity at ChatGPT’s unmatchable speeds.
Benefit 6: Unrestricted Applicability
Perhaps the most exciting part of all of this is that ChatGPT is available to everyone, for use in most contexts. There are restrictions on using the tool to generate certain types of content – but these terms exclusively prohibit harmful use-cases and so are very unlikely to limit utility to a legal business. The sole caveat is that copywriters must clearly disclose that content was generated with the help of AI, and identify your organisation the publisher.
Benefit 7: Unmatched Cost Efficiency
All of ChatGPT’s functionality is provided at very manageable costs. OpenAI employ a pay-as-you-go payment model, priced at only 2 US cents per 1000 tokens (750 words) for Davinci, the most powerful ChatGPT language model. Additionally, with multiple model tiers, expenditure and generation speed can be tailored to each specific task – meaning you get cheaper outputs faster in scenarios such as rough article drafting where iteration and rapidity are non-negotiable. You can even start experimenting for free with US$18 of free credit!
Limitation 1: A Tool is Only as Good as Its User
However, relying on AI tools does come with some drawbacks. For example, despite its sophistication ChatGPT does not understand nuance and language as well as humans do. Although relevancy to the provided prompt is ensured by a natural language processing algorithm, the quality of the outputted text is ultimately contingent on the specificity of this prompt. Ambiguous language, failure to specify style, or typos can render text of poor quality that does not match the intentions of the prompt writer. Of course, experimenting with the tool and making note of key phrases that achieve desirable, brand consistent, and high-quality content can help resolve this issue in many cases – however any budding prompt writer is probably going to have to dedicate some time to developing their familiarity with ChatGPT. Whilst this is still faster than manually writing copy in the long run, the first couple of articles produced this way could be a poor fit for your business’ content strategy – so make sure not to over-commit to a ChatGPT backed workflow.
Limitation 2: Staying Up-To-Date
Training data for ChatGPT cuts off in 2021, and although the model is still being iterated on using data inputted by its users, a lack of awareness of current events and trends can mean major shifts in industries or markets after this time are impossible to capture.
Limitation 3: There Are No New Ideas
Furthermore, ChatGPT does not account for the originality of its content (e.g. potential plagiarism), and businesses have to take steps to ensure that their generated content does not contain text copied from another source. AI generated content may also lack the energy and nuance of copy crafted by a human being due its reliance on existing knowledge rather than actual creativity or emotion.
Limitation 4: Keep It Concise
ChatGPT can suffer some frustrating errors when producing large volumes of text at once – like jokes taken too literally or a bot-like writing style – which could damage your brand image if published live inadvertently. This can mean even with careful prompt writing ChatGPT sometimes struggles to produce fully up to date and relevant copy over a certain length. For example – I once experimented with creating a Halloween themed story using ChatGPT about creepy spiders crawling out from under blankets! Although some interesting and relevant sentences were produced such as “Suddenly you hear a scuttling sound coming from underneath your blankets…” my story also featured a huge collection of Spiderman references – definitely not suitable for the spooky vibe I had hoped for!
Conclusion
Ultimately, the limitations of AI-generated content can be addressed via a three-pronged ChatGPT content generation approach. This method requires that businesses, marketers and content creators utilise prompts for each section of the work, perform plagiarism software review, and undertake a final pass and polish. This ensures originality and quality, whilst also allowing post-2021 information to be added, without drastically increasing lead times beyond just pulling content from ChatGPT unedited. For more technically minded teams, it is even possible to augment ChatGPT using any training dataset – which can help alleviate issues with relevancy or outputted text not capturing brand style.
So should companies use AI tools such as ChatGPT on their customer-facing content? Absolutely yes – but they work best as part of a holistic content pipeline with small human teams rather than as a pure automation solution. Writers capable of producing accurate prompts and serving as editor to AI text outputs are still essential in delivering top-notch copy, and with ChatGPT by their side can plan and generate large volumes of work faster than ever, without a drop in quality. AI can definitely boost productivity and enhance profitability, but it is not a replacement for human intelligence.
