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The Promise (and Peril) of Artificial Intelligence for Content Creators

Artificial intelligence for content creators

Artificial intelligence is arguably the hottest growth area of business this year and could be for the rest of the decade. In early 2023, Microsoft announced a $10 Billion investment in ChatGPT creator OpenAI. Google followed a month later with a $300 Million investment in AI startup Anthropic, giving them a 10% stake in the company. So big tech’s big bucks are flowing to artificial intelligence right now, and that will sustain its growth path, at least for the foreseeable future. As you might guess, artificial intelligence for content creators will hold great promise as well.

If you haven’t already, you should familiarize yourself with these tools. ChatGPT is the most popular, and I’ve been using it since December of 2022. You can experiment with it yourself here.

At first blush, Artificial Intelligence seems like a godsend for content creators. It has the potential to address many of the most pressing problems that content creators have:

  • Ideation. This is big for me, I have always struggled with coming up with enough ideas for new content.
  • Editing. My process to editing goes like this: Publish the post, then immediately proofread it. With AI, you can have your post proofread for you quickly and easily, and have it edited in pretty much any style you choose.
  • SEO, AI can easily give you tips to improve the search engine performance and rankings for your content.
  • Visual enhancements.  AI can suggest appropriate visual components.
  • Headline writing tweaks.  AI can write your headlines for you! Many content creators and especially bloggers struggle with writing compelling headlines.

 

So as you can see, when used correctly, artificial intelligence can greatly aid content creators. But there are some potential drawbacks to consider as well.

AI Should Enhance Your Content Creation, it Shouldn’t Replace it

The best way to look at Artificial Intelligence is as a tool you can use to improve an existing output, not as a tool that creates the content for you.

Let’s look at two scenarios to illustrate the difference:

First, let’s say you have agreed to cook dinner for friends. Since you aren’t much of a cook, you decided to go with something quick and easy, spaghetti with marinara. For the marinara, you decided to choose Rao’s Homemade Marinara (which is actually quite good), but you want to pass it off as being your own homemade concoction.

So your friends arrive, but it seems Michael invited his friend Paolo to join the group, and of course Paolo would just so happen to be a world-class chef. So when your friends begin dinner, they compliment you on the spaghetti and sauce, which you claim you made yourself. Paolo compliments it as well, adds it tastes remarkably close to Rao’s that can be bought from the shelf, and asks for your recipe.  Oops.  This would be an example of having AI do the work for you, and how that can create problems.

Now let’s look at the second scenario. In this scenario, you are still making dinner for your friends, still making spaghetti, but in this example you can actually cook! And you have gotten quite good at making homemade marinara, as your friends will attest. So your friends arrive a bit early for dinner, and again, Michael invites Paolo along to dinner. When you learn that Paolo is a world-class chef, you invite him to sample your marinara as you are preparing it. He marvels at the taste, you thank him and add that you think it needs some more ‘heat’, but you don’t want to make it spicy. Paolo tastes it again and then suggests you add a pinch of black pepper. You do, and perfection! Your marinara has the exact taste of ‘heat’ you were looking for! In this example, AI, er….Paolo, took an already good homemade marinara sauce, and made it better.  The AI enhanced your work and improved the final product.

Additionally, the information given by AI isn’t always accurate. And that can quickly cause problems:

Also, the sources of information that AI tools pull from, especially visuals such as photos, may include copyrighted material, which can create additional issues:

Also, there’s the concern over spreading misinformation that’s been generated by AI:

 

So how should you use AI as a content creator?

Simply put, AI should be used to enhance content that YOU create. These tools can be quite valuable for content creators, if used correctly. What you don’t want to happen is let the AI create the content, then you tweak it. You should create the content, then use AI as a tool to help edit, enhance and improve YOUR work.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Rolling Out UI Changes, ChatGPT’s Rumored Sale, Global Brands Adopting NFTs

Happy Monday, y’all! Welcome to the first Monday’s Marketing Minute of 2023!  Hope your New Year is off to a great start, here’s some marketing/web3/business stories that caught my eye the last few days:

 

Now that the initial controversy is starting to die down (somewhat), Twitter is starting to roll out some UI changes as Elon gets settled in the captain’s chair.  One in particular that I am really interested in is February, Twitter will roll out the ability to leave 4,000 character tweets. Now to the Twitter purists that are already catching the vapors, Elon has said the tweets will show up in your Home Feed as a normal tweet, and you will have an option to expand and read if you like.

I’m giving serious consideration to how I could use longer tweets on Twitter starting next month. Obviously, Elon wants writers to spend more time with longer tweets, and move more longform content creation onto Twitter and off their blogs and websites. So for content creators, I think it makes sense to think about how the longform content you create on Twitter could help with the longform content you publish on your blog/site, and vice versa. I can already hear people like Joe Pulizzi saying be careful about creating content on platforms you don’t own, and that’s a very valid concern. The one caveat I would offer is that Elon has consistently said since taking over Twitter that he would be adding new options for content creators to make money on the platform. Rolling out longer content could be a part of a larger plan to move content creators to Twitter, but to also pay them once they are here. So I think it bears watching to see how this plays out.

 

So late last year, I first brought ChatGPT to your attention in an edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute. Please do check out ChatGPT if you haven’t already. Think of it as a conversational version of Google search. It’s an insane leap forward in AI (Artificial Intelligence), and it has the entire business world buzzing not only about it, but about where the AI space as a whole could be going.

Well buzz in business often leads to dollars, and that’s certainly the case with ChatGPT. According to the WSJ, there is a $14 Billion offer rumored to be out there for OpenAI, who created ChatGPT. Even if this offer doesn’t go through, a similar, or even more expensive offer is likely right around the corner. AI is going to be everywhere in 2023 and beyond.

 

NFTs aren’t going away, crypto bear market be damned. The recent downturn and all eyes on AI right now may cool some brand investments, but I think that could be a good thing. NFTs will have great potential to brands as a gateway to driving higher levels of customer loyalty, I’ve always said this.  The challenge for brands is to move past the cutesy art phase, and start thinking of NFTs as a utility that can deliver value to the customer.

 

 

So let’s close on a funny note today. I am woe to discuss politics here or on any of my social media channels. I just don’t have the energy to argue politics all day with strangers who seem to have the emotional temperament of a toddler with diaper rash. But this Bad Lip Reading of the near brawl in the House chambers late last week is too good not to share.

 

Y’all have a great week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon Releases The Twitter Files, OpenAI Debuts ChatGPT

Happy First Monday of December, y’all! Hope you are having a wonderful week so far.  I know a lot of you are knee-deep in Holiday planning, as well as budgeting for 2023 at work, and all the personal and professional craziness that comes at the end of the year. Just remember not to overextend yourself, and take some time to relax and enjoy the season.  Here’s a couple of news stories that caught my eye over the last week.

 

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter continues to be a massive story. One of the constant complaints about Twitter for several years now has been questionable content moderation choices made at the company.  Certain stories seemed to be censored, or users expressing a certain opinion or political slant seemed to be suspended at an unusually high rate. Well Elon has promised to share the internal communications around some of these controversial moves, and that started last Saturday with the first release of what Elon is calling The Twitter Files.  The first installment dealt with Twitter’s decision to suppress the story involving Hunter Biden’s laptop.  You can click the tweet below and read the entire thread if you are interested.

Elon has said this will be the first of multiple dumps around particular topics.  He’s suggested that the next installment of The Twitter Files will drop either today or tomorrow, and concern events that happened immediately after the 2020 Presidential election.

Regardless of your take on the politics involved, this story is a huge deal for the entire social media industry. What Elon is doing is taking transparency to a new level, and it will put a ton of pressure on other social media sites to match his efforts to fully disclose how each site tackles content moderation and user privacy. I also believe that Elon’s moves now are positioning Twitter to become the dominant social media platform in the world, within the next 5 years. We’ll see if he can keep the momentum going.

 

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating and evolving area of technology that deserves your attention. To that end, OpenAI just launched a chat bot/tool called ChatGPT.  You can sign up for a free account with OpenAI and test out ChatGPT for yourself, and I would advise you to do so at this link:

Some people are calling ChatGPT a ‘Google killer’.  The reason for the excitement is that AI like ChatGPT allows you to have a conversation with an information source, something you cannot do with a search engine. You can ask ChatGPT questions and it will answer in an attempted conversational tone.  Also, ChatGPT has a ‘memory’, so it can build off of your previous questions and adjust answers given as you change the question.

To give you a sense of what it can do, I asked ChatGPT to tell me what I should tell you about Artificial Intelligence:

Now this type of AI brings up some obvious ethical considerations, especially for writers.  With some simple back and forth, I got ChatGPT to write entire blog posts for me, in seconds.  I could get it to write a scene from a book, I just need to give some simple parameters on what information to include, and ChatGPT does the rest to fill in the blanks.  For instance I asked ChatGPT to write the opening scene of a murder mystery involving a tour bus that breaks down in front of a deserted mansion, and within seconds, ChatGPT gave me the scene.  And it was actually really good!

So definitely sign up for a free OpenAI account and play with ChatGPT.  Whether you love it or become bored with it immediately, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with where the technology of AI is headed.

 

So that’s all for this week, I only included two stories, but I think both stories are important and deserve you spending some time checking into them, so I wanted to stop at two.  Plus I couldn’t find a third story I wanted to include so there’s that.  I hope you have an amazingly productive week!