The chances are that you’ve heard ChatGPT being mentioned heavily in your social feeds and in business articles in recent months. But what exactly is ChatGPT? In essence, it’s an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that promises to automate a lot of tasks, including write your content for you.
But do these AI content-writing tools live up to the hype? And what’s the best way to balance using a solution like ChatGPT with the core skills of good human-powered writing?
What does ChatGPT do?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot model from OpenAI that can produce complex, well-written responses to any prompt you give it. It uses a huge database of sources to provide you with complete blog posts, articles, email – in fact, it will write whatever you ask it to.
Is AI content writing the answer to your business prayers?
If you believe what technologists and business leaders are saying, these AI tools have the potential to replace a lot of the human work involved in writing. This could mean writing your blog posts, sales emails, or even looking after your internal comms. (There will be a lot of other functions the tools will be applied to, but we are focussing on writing here)
But does a solution like ChatGPT live up to this promise? Yes and no. Here are a couple of things that you’ll want to bear in mind when you use these tools.
- Creating content that stands out
ChatGPT can certainly provide you with business content – but it can be quite generic and bland. This generic nature of AI content may be a problem. You want your brand content to stand out and be unique – but this is more difficult when using the same AI tools as every other small business. As Tom Fishburne puts it, the issue is that ‘much of what is created is already a sea of sameness, written more to appease Google’s search algorithms than actual people.’
A human, like you and me, has opinions, personality and can deliver unique insights. AI cannot do this. It’s limited to the source data and models it’s been provided with. So, if you want your business content to stand out, you need an experienced human writer who writes for humans not just the bots.
Content writing is as much about having good ideas as it is about writing well. So, what you input as your prompt to the AI is just as important as the text that the software spits out.
- Content accuracy
When Chat GPT’s rival, Bard was first launched it wrongly attributed the discovery of an exoplanet to a telescope that didn’t exist at the time of the discovery. The problem is that the internet has become increasingly cluttered with fake news, spam links and content that’s designed purely for SEO. So it’s no wonder that the AI will sometimes provide you with content that is inaccurate.
As a business owner you’ll want to make sure that a human is involved – to create a unique and original brief and then to review the output for accuracy and relevance for your brand and your audience.
What’s the best balance between AI and human writing?
AI tools are useful. But, at present, you still need a human in the equation. Someone to come up with the ideas, write intelligent prompts for the AI and edit the output so it sounds more human and personalised.
Working with both AI tools AND a content professional is the best way to ensure you’re getting the eye-catching content you deserve.
