Are content creators quivering in their boots with dread over whether ChatGPT and other copywriting tools will take over their jobs? Or are they looking at the opportunity of leveraging AI in their toolbox and tech stack to be better marketers?
AI Adoption by Content Marketers
Creating great content is the foundation of attracting your perfect-fit customer or ideal visitor to your site. Content marketers and SEO specialists are continually working and running towards a rolling finish line to find the correct formulas, angles, keywords and long tails to create content to get in front of the right sets of eyeballs, be at the top of the search game and be read by millions or even go viral. It’s the virtual garden where SEO thrives and paying customers are born. A place where AI can play a huge role in creating and continually updating content to appease the ever-changing search engine algorithms.
I had an opportunity to speak with Malay Upadhyay, AI technology leader about the role AI can play in the marketer’s toolkit. He shares the key areas marketers can use AI to their advantage.
As we enter the age of Generative AI where texts can be turned into images, images can be turned into videos or a Van Gogh, and entire articles can be auto-generated with a single query, Marketers will need to understand and use AI to remain competitive. The best Marketers will plug multiple complementary AI solutions to execute three tasks: generate deep and timely insights, automate actionability on those insights, and create specific content drafts to utilize in those actions. However, they will still need to research, strategize, correct and make decisions around deploying AI-generated content for it to be accurate and relevant. Remember that the pinnacle of AI’s capabilities is when it can behave like humans and humans always produce the best results as a team. In other words, successful Marketers will continue to see and leverage AI as a handy colleague, not as their replacement.”
Disrupting Content Creation with AI
There is still much doubt in the market regarding AI-generated or assisted content and its viability and ethics. Clay Christensen was a Harvard Business School Professor and the Godfather of disruptive innovation. In his disruptive model, the use of AI to generate content today is comparable to disruptive technologies like cell phones and personal computers. AI-driven content creators or assistants are market disruptors with hurdles to overcome in the areas of adoption and ethics.
AI generated content is in early stages of the technology adoption curve where the innovators have done their initial work, and the early adopters are leveraging the technology. If we look at the Gartner Hypecycle point of view, AI-generated content is at the Peak of Inflated Expectations, where there are some successes, but there will be scores of failures.
AI or Human Written Content
If the content is valuable, is it genuinely relevant if a human wrote it? I recently polled 84 people on LinkedIn and asked, “Do you care if the content you read was written by an AI or a human” and the results are are close with over 40 percent of respondents indicating they want to consume human content and 56 percent indicating they don’t care whether or not the content is AI generated.
People appear to be more concerned about the quality and value of the content rather than who or what wrote it. Some believe that if writing is an art, AI has no place in it. In any case, there is still healthy opposition on both sides.
AI has been here all along
AI is no stranger to content creators; at least, it shouldn’t be. Tools like Copy.ai, Jasper.ai, Creaitor.ai and even products to help improve creators’ writing, like Gocopy.ai and Grammarly plus so many more, have been in use with little to no fanfare, let alone great debate in the marketing community.
AI content saves time. It does the research based on a few key ideas and generates a result based on what exists. There won’t be anything really new or ground breaking ideas in AI generated content as those typically come from humans. People are already using AI to write everything from short-form to long-form content, but can you spot the difference? Is it possible for a human to determine whether the content is AI-generated or human-written? Unlikely to the untrained eye. How do you cite an article written exclusively by AI? Who owns the IP? These are good questions that still need to be answered.
If Ryan Reynolds can use ChatGPT to create script copy for his ad for Mint Mobile, albeit with a few hiccups, it may be a good starting point for stuck marketers or content creators who need a little boost.
AI Costs Money, Why ChatGPT can’t always be free
Can ChatGPT survive being free to create content, code and more? What is the business model that will make it viable? While we are feeding data into the machine, we are giving it everything it needs to be a powerhouse. The more it is used, the better it will get.
I spoke to Olivier Caron Lizotte, CEO ExplorAI to get his thoughts on the viability of ChatGPT as a free service and the potential business models long term.
“ChatGPT is not viable as a free service, and OpenAI is currently looking for ways to monetize it. Given the limited execution resources and the high inference costs per execution, the first commercial uses will likely be sporadic and manual rather than sequential (meaning they would offer a limited number of use per month for a given price). For example, a marketing agency could monetize ChatGPT by having an employee use it to write personalized introductory texts, giving context to the system, and using the dialogue formula to steer the writing in the desired direction. Eventually, custom versions of ChatGPT could be used for customer support, but given the huge training costs, initial use will be limited to very large organizations for the next 2-4 years.”
Free AI on demand for everyone is only sustainable if it is heavily funded. Processing costs money, and machine learning at scale can be costly. Training, deploying and using the model all have associated individual costs. Therefore, the price will need to be covered by a significant investment or pushed to the customer as part of a package, bundle, API call, pay as you go, or combination. With an investment rumored in the billions for ChatGPT, and investors looking to AI as it disrupts the market yet again, there is no slowing down innovation or availability.
Brock Murray, CEO of SEOPlus+ has been monitoring ChatGPT closely as it relates to their business and views this as an opportunity to improve productivity.
“As a digital marketing agency we have been following the development of GPT-3 technology and the OpenAI project for a few years now. With the release of Chat GPT there has been hype on a mass scale as people realize the opportunities this technology brings. For us, our focus has been on utilizing this tool to reduce the amount of time our team spends on mundane tasks so they can spend more time on high level strategy. Some examples of things that we have used so far have been to help create content outlines for blog content, evaluate and identify PR opportunities for our clients on an automated basis, as well as to help with the creation of checklists for internal processes. Currently the opportunities are more so rudimentary and I think that long term we will see more companies register with Open AI and train their own models to complete much more advanced tasks that will change the way the world works. Additionally I believe that those that don’t embrace this technology (along with GPT-4 once it is released) will be at a significant disadvantage and will fall behind.”
AI itself may not replace people in the future, but a person leveraging AI might.
