The AI Paradox: The Impact of ChatGPT on Content Marketing

I have been closely following the launch of ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot that has recently caught the world’s attention.

With its natural language processing and machine learning techniques, ChatGPT is pushing the boundaries of what seemed possible for AI.

However, as with any new technology, there are risks and opportunities to consider. In fact, there’s even a paradox here, as AI can both commoditize and enhance human creativity.

I want to invite you to reflect on the question that everyone is asking these days: what is the actual impact of ChatGPT (and other disruptive AI-writing tools) on the future of Content Marketing? Let me share my thoughts.

The Impressive Results of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is augmenting the capabilities of creative professionals, including marketers.

It can analyze consumer data and behavior, providing valuable insights that help professionals create more effective messaging and channels to reach specific target audiences.

AI optimizes content, landing page design, and conversion rates.

It enhances human creativity and proxies creators with new tools to deliver work more efficiently.

Here at Rock Content, we closely monitor AI-powered content editors together with image and video editing software.

In many cases, such tools are truly helping creators to enhance their creative work.

On the other hand, AI does come with several risks and potential opportunities. I’m a big believer in what Paul Graham tweeted recently:

Ultimately, AI has the power to commoditize lower-quality content while augmenting the potential and value of human creativity.

AI makes handmade content more valuable and provides creators with new ways to express creativity.

For marketing, when used with the right intentions and human supervision, AI will be a powerful tool in a brand’s arsenal.

The Paradox of AI

AI commoditizes content creation, while at the same time, making handmade content more valuable. 

This creates the so-called “great paradox of AI”; brands and marketers need to carefully approach AI in content marketing while considering risks and benefits. It’s clear, however, that nothing replaces the human touch. Humans win in several areas, such as:

• Creativity: Human-created content is more creative and unique. It’s based on personal experiences, perspectives, and emotions. AI content is only based on trained data.
• Quality: While the quality of human-created content can vary, it tends to be higher than ChatGPT content thanks to the human’s knowledge, experience, and research.
• Contextual understanding: Human-created content displays a deep understanding of context and subject matter. AI lacks that depth of connection in content creation.
• Emotions, opinions, authenticity: Human-created content is natural and conveys a wide range of emotions, opinions, and styles. AI content lacks nuance.
• Purpose: Human-created content has a purpose, such as entertainment or persuasion. AI content focuses on large volumes of content, which can deliver mediocre outcomes.

The Risks of ChatGPT

Long story short, ChatGPT will still require human oversight, curation, and editing to deliver the expected outcomes.

It comes with big risks and has lower quality than handmade content and is less effective at engaging audiences.

It can decrease the overall quality of content found on the internet and reduce the voices and perspectives in content.

Lastly, AI-powered content is not as easily discoverable and can even be penalized by search engines.

How Chatbots as a Whole Are Impacting Industries

Chatbots, like ChatGPT, as a whole are impacting certain industries. My favorite disruptive examples are:

• Social media: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are responding to customer inquiries and providing personalized content recommendations. However, as some big brands are already noticing, these bots don’t always get it right, which can frustrate customers.
• Media and entertainment: AI can generate captions, subtitles, and scripts for movies and TV shows.
• Finance: AI can generate financial reports, data analysis, and insights for decision-making.

How to Leverage ChatGPT in Your Content Marketing Efforts

ChatGPT is a powerful tool, and with the right precautions, can contribute to our own content marketing efforts.

When considering leveraging ChatGPT, it is important to work with experts to create a strategy that uses the tool naturally and that aligns with your company’s goals and objectives.

Never risk being off-brand or irrelevant. Here are a few ways ChatGPT can help:

• Generate content ideas: ChatGPT can help you come up with titles and other content ideas that you can then use human-generated content to expand upon.
• Copy editing: AI can go through the content and help improve the quality of content by finding and reducing grammatical errors.
• SEO: ChatGPT can help marketers generate keyword ideas that can create content plans for blogging and social media.
• Generate captions and subtitles: ChatGPT can generate captions and subtitles for videos and audio content, which makes it more accessible to a wider audience.
• Virtual assistants: GPT3, the brain behind ChatGPT, can create a virtual assistant that can help customers with tasks like booking appointments, ordering new products, and finding information.

Will ChatGPT Substitute the Work of Content Creators and Coders?

Whenever new AI technology is introduced, there’s always the concern that it will replace the jobs of human workers. Currently, ChatGPT is automating tasks and making the work of creators and coders more efficient. 

A great example of this is GitHub copilot, which helps developers become more productive by tapping into the knowledge of the world’s open-source code.

But the quality of GPT3 content is still heavily dependent on the quality of the data it’s trained on. It requires human oversight and curation to ensure that the output is suitable for the intended audiences.

To put it another way, GPT3 still requires some technical knowledge from developers to use it to its full capacity.

It’s not a tool that someone with no experience in programming or data analysis can use, especially if you want to get the best results out of it.

If your company intends to go beyond the basics, which it should, you’ll need a team of developers to train it on real-world data and audience-relevant information, as well as maintain it and keep it up to date. 

It’s important to remember to approach the use of ChatGPT and other AI tools with the understanding that they exist to augment human capabilities and help us work more efficiently, not to replace us.

That’s precisely why platforms like WriterAccess continue to thrive among marketers and brand owners. We recognize the value of human creativity and critical thinking, complemented by the power of AI tools.

If you’re curious to experience this powerful combination firsthand, you can give WriterAccess a try with a 14-day free trial.

The Upcoming Emergence of AI in Bing Search Capabilities

While I find it unlikely that ChatGPT will replace search, it is exciting to see Microsoft utilizing it for interesting opportunities ahead.

Bing is the perfect playground for Microsoft to experiment in.

Using the natural language processing capabilities of ChatGPT, Bing may be able to generate more personalized content for its users, making it a more attractive option for a relevant segment of search users or use cases.

I do expect to see more SERP answers powered by AI, giving users the answer to what they’re looking for in a quick and personalized way.

However, I also think that this approach may lead to a decrease in overall content quality available on the Internet and a decrease in the voices and perspectives out there.

AI can add bias and lead to a decrease in the discoverability of niche websites, expert voices, and web diversity.

Overall, I’m excited by the move on the part of Microsoft to enhance Bing’s search capabilities. It’s a bold strategy that could shake up the search engine landscape, at least on a partial level.

Rock Content will be monitoring what’s coming next closely and will continue exploring the applications to bring the best use cases to clients and creators. Stay tuned!