We’ve seen quite a bit of content that AI has generated lately. When I took my first steps into a marketing career as I was still in graduate school, my first two roles were in the content creation field. I wrote articles for small Dutch businesses that wanted to outsource the hard labor that goes into writing. As a student, it was great to make my money writing (something I liked doing!) instead of bartending (which I also liked but was a lot more tiring).
In my first marketing leadership position, I faced the same issue my former employers did: I ‘needed’ to post articles, but I needed more time to write them. I worked with many freelancers and agencies but often encountered the same problem: the nichier the subject, the harder it was to manage the cost balance between quality and quantity.
As a DIY marketer, this new development excited me. But, as a philosopher specializing in ‘the dangers of technology’, it also scared me a bit.
ChatGTP and Philosophy
I fed the question, “What would Heidegger think about ChatGTP?” into the popular chatbot that has been making waves on the internet this week. This is what it spit out:
“It is impossible for me to know for certain what Heidegger would think of ChatGPT, as he is a historical figure and I am a machine learning model trained to assist with a variety of tasks. However, given Heidegger’s philosophical focus on the nature of being and the relationship between humans and technology, it is possible that he might have some interesting thoughts on the nature and implications of a language model like ChatGPT.”
– ChatGTP, December 2022
Well – they are right about one thing. Heidegger WOULD have some interesting thoughts on the nature and implications of an AI chatbot that is THAT good. However, coincidentally, the first part of the answer is a tell: am I really interested in what Heidegger, the historical figure, would think? Or am I asking about his thought? But I may be nitpicky.
Philosophy aside, I have primarily worked in small start-ups where people were expected to do more with less. So I’ve always been keen to try out new tools that make my life easier because so much content creation nowadays is not about writing in-depth explorations but rather about spitting out X variations of a text to find out what works best and pleases the algorithm.
The use case for AI-generated content in digital marketing
Why use AI to help you create content? What can AI-generated content really deliver? Let’s ask the OpenAI Playground:
“AI can support content creation for digital marketing in a variety of ways. For example, AI can create content through natural language processing, which can help marketers generate content quickly and efficiently. You can also use AI to identify topics to focus on for content creation and analyze data to identify trends that can inform content creation. You can also use AI to determine the best times to post content and optimize content for search engine optimization. Finally, AI can personalize content for target audiences and automate tasks such as scheduling and posting content.”
– OpenAI Playground, December 2022
A little monotonous as a paragraph, but I’ll take it. Over the last few days, since ChatGTP has made waves on LinkedIn, I’ve been trying to find use cases that work. Fully outsourcing your content creation to a bot will get obvious quickly, but this doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. Five things I tried out and where I was pleasantly surprised:
- Having it spit out a rough draft offers you a starting point for editing.
- Getting inspiration for listicles by asking for “5 reasons why X is Y”.
- Rewriting content for guest posts to re-use articles for link-building purposes.
- Utilizing it to provide dryer paragraphs of text that cover all the SEO essentials.
- Summarizing content for emails and social media posts.
I am excited to see where this development takes us and what this means for content marketing.