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The Downfall of Using ChatGPT for Marketing Content

Downfalls of using ChatGPT in Marketing Content

It seems that you can’t go anywhere on the internet these days without running into a discussion about ChatGPT. You might even hear a reference to it when watching the TV or listening to the radio in your car. The buzz is everywhere, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this new technology could do virtually anything that it was asked to do. 

Of course, reality is more complicated, and the true capabilities of ChatGPT may be a bit overstated at this point. That’s not to say that it isn’t a powerful technology with incredible potential for the future. But in the here and now, it’s important to exercise caution regarding use cases and to only deploy the use of this tech where it makes sense. We’ll dive into this topic and the impact of ChatGPT on marketing content in the discussion below. 

What is ChatGPT?

How Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Works

First, let’s make sure we are clear on what this tool is and why it is getting so much attention lately. ChatGPT is an AI tool that is capable of answering questions using advanced language processing technology. While not designed specifically to write content, it can be used for that task, and recent updates to the tool have caused more and more people to explore the possibility of using ChatGPT for content writing and many other tasks. While it is currently free to use, it seems likely that there will be a cost associated with using future versions of ChatGPT. 

The Obvious Appeal

It’s not hard to understand the underlying motivation behind using ChatGPT for marketing content. First and foremost, paying humans to do this type of work is expensive, so countless businesses are intrigued by the idea of getting that content for free. If you could produce quality marketing content without the associated cost of paying an employee or freelancer to do the job, why wouldn’t you make that switch? 

In addition to potential cost savings, you might also be drawn to the consistency of a computer as opposed to a human writer. Computers don’t have bad days, so they are going to perform at the same level time after time, no matter what. Consistency is what machines do best, after all. Since you want all of your marketing content to reach a high level of quality, you might think that letting an AI tool like ChatGPT do the job would result in performance that is not subject to the variations that come with the work that humans produce. 

There is one other point that could be seen as favoring AI over humans – complete knowledge of a topic that even the most experienced person simply couldn’t match. Since tons of data is poured into the models that make up these kinds of AI tools, the tools wind up using a stunning volume of information to work their magic. It wouldn’t be possible for the human brain to hold on to so much knowledge, so this would seem to be yet another reason to turn your marketing work over to the AI realm. 

A Few Points of Concern

As you might have expected based on the title of this article, not all is as rosy as it might seem with the idea of using AI for marketing content. When you look a little closer and think more carefully about how this strategy will play out in the real world, you start to find some things that are a little concerning. Let’s break down some of those points below –

A.I. Marketing Content Concerns
  • The writing isn’t great. Okay – so it’s true that ChatGPT can produce content that is properly written and doesn’t include many grammatical errors. But that doesn’t mean that it is writing you would be proud to have representing your brand. Many people feel that they can tell when a computer rather than a person wrote something. There is something missing with AI content – it feels like it was written by a bot, because it was. That type of writing may have some very useful practical applications, like answering basic questions within a chatbot setting, but it probably isn’t the type of content that you would like to use for your general marketing purposes. Most likely, you’ll want content that features more personality and better represents the experience that customers will have when interacting with your brand as a customer. 
  • Human time is still required. Even if you are happy enough with the quality of the writing that is produced by ChatGPT, you’ll still need to spend some time working on it to make sure it suits your marketing goals. You start the process by entering a prompt for the tool to use as the foundation for what it creates, but is that prompt going to completely cover the tone and style of what you want? And is the content that is produced going to touch on every area that you want to highlight for your marketing efforts? Once the tool spits out some content, you’ll need to then invest some human time in refining the content, making improvements, removing irrelevant sections, etc. So, when you start to factor in this time, are you really saving that much time and effort in the end? It may have just been better to start off with a human writing the content as compared to having a human go back and fix what a computer created. 
  • How will you stand out? One of the primary objectives of marketing content is to stand out from the competition. You need to present your brand in a way that gives potential customers a reason to give you a try – or to at least reach out for more information. That’s going to be hard to do if you are using the same AI technology as everyone else to write your marketing materials. Remember, if you have access to this tool, so does everyone else that is competing for attention in your market. So, if you all use it, the marketing content is inevitably going to look similar – if not exactly the same – from one brand to the next. In this way, the brands that stick with having human writers create their marketing materials might wind up having a distinct advantage. Humans will be able to evaluate the competition in real time and develop unique marketing ideas in a way that current technology simply cannot match. If you want to stand out in your market, leaving marketing content generation to real people as opposed to AI bots seems like the only viable option. 

Other Lingering Issues

The problems above are likely to be the primary issues that you encounter when creating AI content for your business. There are even more issues to consider, however, depending on how you play to deploy this content. For one thing, Google may not respond as you would like in terms of ranking your AI content, so this probably isn’t a great strategy for any content that you are using as part of an SEO strategy. While you could certainly turn out a lot of content quite quickly, the ability of that content to rank highly in the results is in doubt. 

Also, you might run into accuracy problems with the content that is produced for you. Even computers make mistakes, and getting things right within your content is critical if you want to build and maintain trust with your audience. So, you’ll need to carefully check whatever the AI produces for you to make sure it is accurate and up to your standards – and again, if you have to check it carefully anyway, you might as well create it with the use of human writers instead. 

There is also a bigger picture question to ponder here about the future of your business and where you are putting control of the assets that matter most. When you have humans develop your marketing content, those people are gaining a deep understanding of your business and your customer base. Is the AI technology going to learn as much about your brand specifically? It will know a lot about the world as a whole, of course, but its knowledge of your brand may never advance beyond the very basics. And without knowing where the model for AI content will go in the future, you might be missing out on an opportunity to have people grow within your brand and become capable of producing outstanding work that takes you to a higher level.

A.I. vs. Human Brain

It’s Not All Bad

We’ve made it clear at this point that using ChatGPT to simply produce all of your marketing content is almost certainly a bad idea. Yes, the appeal of automation is hard to resist, but there are simply too many problems and too many potential issues to make it a viable strategy at this time. 

But that doesn’t mean you have to ignore ChatGPT completely. In the right workflow, there are likely methods that you can use to have this technology help you in your marketing endeavors. You can think of it more like an assistant rather than a replacement for a human writer. For instance, if you or your writer were to feed ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a content outline, you could immediately get a great starting point for a piece of content that is then written by a person. 

Alternatively, you could ask it to do some basic research for you, returning links to other places on the web where you can look for sources for the content you are writing. In this way, with a human always involved, the tool can be a helpful aid to potentially get you better results in less time.

Should you consider using ChatGPT as a tool that you can turn to for specific tasks during your day? Possibly – there are ways to leverage the technology to help your work run more efficiently, as we discussed above. With that said, it seems unlikely that marketing content that is written entirely by ChatGPT is going to be as impactful, or as effective, as what is produced by a human. For now, at least, that has remained unchanged, and the talent you or someone on your team brings to marketing content can be the difference maker that helps you rise above the competition. Good luck!

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Morgan Staples
About Morgan Staples:

Morgan Staples leads written and verbal content efforts for digital marketing projects and campaigns, delivering highly effective copy that drives leads and sales. She has always loved reading, writing and research papers, and now she gets to put that to use every day.

Learn more about Morgan.

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