Will ChatGPT Support, Transform, or Undermine Content Marketing?

Artificial intelligence has never been more difficult to escape. Don’t worry - there’s no need to call in Schwarzenegger and John Connor. Not yet, anyway. However, the influence of this burgeoning technology is undeniable. From computer-generated artwork and music to vehicle safety and factory automation, AI already permeates our day-to-day lives, regardless of whether we’re aware of it.

Marketers’s lives are certainly affected. AI has been available for content creation for some time. At 1827 Marketing, we’ve been keeping track of developments for the past several years. But, despite showing promise, the technology has so far been a helpful sidekick but not up to the task of generating high-quality content.

OpenAI shook things up with the release of ChatGPT in December 2022. 

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an interactive chatbot built on OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of language models. It can provide detailed, articulate responses to questions across many domains of knowledge - and do so with a natural, conversational tone that’s unlike anything the world has seen before.

Besides answering questions, ChatGPT can generate stories and poems, complete translations, and even write code (or debug yours).

So uncanny are ChatGPT’s abilities that it began trending on TikTok shortly after launch. Social media is awash with reaction videos and thought pieces. Within five days of its release, ChatGPT had over a million users - a milestone Facebook took over a year to reach.

Another area OpenAI has Facebook beat is with engagement in its vision of the future. ChatGPT has captured people’s imagination in a way that, to date, Zuckerberg’s Metaverse has failed to do.

ChatGPT has the potential to disrupt and change our world in the same way the iPhone did back in 2007. And, just as Apple’s defining product continues to evolve nearly fifteen years later, conversational AI technology is only going to get more sophisticated from here. 

A more sophisticated language model, GPT-4, is imminent. And some of the biggest names in tech are scrambling to shape the future of this market. Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI and is rumoured to be looking at integrating GPT in Bing and Office. Meanwhile, Google is working on its own chatbot technology.

So what’s a savvy content marketer to do? Is it time to close our laptops, leave the bots to it, and start a new career? Or is this another over-hyped technology simply having its moment in the sun?

The answer is a firm “neither.” For now, think of ChatGPT as a fresh-faced intern, unencumbered by human concerns, like sleeping. Use ChatGPT wisely, and trust it with the right projects, and it can become one of your most effective colleagues. But let it get in over its head, and you’ll be the one to face the consequences.

How ChatGPT Can Support Your Content Marketing Efforts

To help us get a handle on using this precocious ‘bot as a content marketing aid, we went to one of the industry’s experts on ChatGPT: ChatGPT itself! We’ve included its thoughts wherever relevant below, with only slight editing for readability (ChatGPT loves passive voice).

“AI-generated content should support and enhance human efforts rather than replace them,” ChatGPT said.

“AI-generated content is a great way to augment human capabilities and make our lives easier, but it shouldn’t replace human creativity, critical thinking, and decision-making. Certain tasks require human intelligence and understanding, such as complex and nuanced decision-making, creative problem solving, and emotional intelligence.”

Here are a few of our favourite ways to put AI to use ‘augmenting’ our capabilities:

Brainstorming and Ideation

ChatGPT is a great brainstorming buddy. Perhaps it won’t ever take a turn at scribing at the whiteboard. But it will also never kill the vibe with furtive glances at its smartphone or tire of suggesting ideas. We’ve found that ChatGPT often provides new perspectives on a piece of content when used this way, although, after a point, it becomes recursive.

Drafting Content

Given a prompt, ChatGPT can help across many types of content marketing campaign. It can generate headlines, article titles, image captions, social media posts, email subject lines, article outlines, and more. If you can create a prompt for it, it can provide plenty of output. However, for reasons we’ll get into, we recommend you use this as a jumping off place rather than finished copy.

Content Curation

Your tireless robo-intern can help to generate abstracts and summaries of relevant blog posts, white papers, or articles. This lets you focus on developing original insight and analysis that adds value for your audience. Again, make sure someone gives its output a thorough review and don’t take it at face value.

Content Analysis

ChatGPT is, at heart, a language model. It can use natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to classify a text’s sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral. It’s even capable of parsing context: if a word typically associated with negativity appears positively or neutrally, the model considers that. You can even use ChatGPT to find a text’s theme or topic: NLP allows the AI to extract meaning and insights from text.

Personalised, Targeted Content

You can feed ChatGPT specific parameters on your target audience and ask it to generate content tailored for their interests. It gives different responses when given demographics, interests and browsing history, and previous interactions, for example. ChatGPT uses machine learning to adjust its output, to drive engagement or increase the likelihood of social share.

Using ChatGPT for rote, repetitive tasks can free you up to focus on more sophisticated, complex, and (frankly) interesting things. For example, you could write the sort of analysis that will position you as a thought leader with high-value prospects. Or maybe work on making your latest case study a multi-media extravaganza.

“AI-generated content [offers] many benefits such as efficiency, personalization, cost-effectiveness, automation, and innovation,” ChatGPT said. “However, it’s important to use it responsibly, being aware of its limitations, and to ensure it is used to enhance human efforts, not replace them.”

How ChatGPT Might Hinder Your Content Marketing Efforts

As we’ve alluded to throughout this piece, using even a sophisticated AI like ChatGPT poses some challenges. There are things you need to consider around its use as part of a successful content marketing strategy.

Despite ChatGPT’s impressive ability to answer questions like a human, its knowledge is limited. Most events post-2021 are not featured in the model.

We asked it a series of questions about newsworthy events and prominent public figures and received out-of-date information. And while it is capable of creating stories and poems, most are of middling quality, and it frequently recycles elements. 

The AI also has a problem with, as Wikipedia puts it, “uneven factual accuracy.” Though it was trained using a variety of data, ChatGPT does not verify the information it produces. Neither does it have a responsibility to, given its intended purpose as a language model.

Put another way: sometimes ChatGPT just makes things up. Its responses sound plausible, but are often completely false. It will appear to reference books and academic papers that turn out not to exist.

During our conversation with the AI, we asked it to write a profile of a well-known entrepreneur and gave it a link to their biography. The AI got 80% of the information right, but gave them the wrong surname. It also made up books they hadn’t written.

ChatGPT’s output is only as good as its prompt. As a result, developing prompts that will elicit suitable responses from the AI can take some practice. Even a skilled prompter will sometimes receive very plausible-sounding but factually incorrect content.

And despite ChatGPT’s ability to personalise content, one area where it still has room to grow is in harnessing a brand’s voice and tone. The AI is well aware of this. 

“Some people might think that AI-generated content lacks authenticity or personality, which could make it less engaging or relatable to the audience,” said ChatGPT.

That perceived lack of authenticity poses another potential challenge for ChatGPT: as this technology becomes ubiquitous, where is the point of difference? Why should your audience care about your content if it isn’t well-differentiated from your competitors?

We put the question to the AI, though its answer wasn’t very reassuring.

“AI-generated content is based on patterns learned from the data. It may not have the same level of creativity or understanding of context as a human writer,” said ChatGPT.

“As AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated, it may be difficult for readers to distinguish between AI-generated content and content created by humans. This could lead to confusion or mistrust in the presented information.”

This risk of mistrust leads to the first of many thorny ethical questions. At what point should you disclose you use AI in your content creation process? Who owns content created by an AI? Does it belong to the company that generated the content or to the creator of the AI itself? 

These same questions plague AI in other areas. Take AI-generated art, where artists have not given permission for their work to be used in training the models.

Perhaps early AI researchers could argue they acted in the name of advancing the technology. However, with monetisation in the picture, we need to ask: at what point does AI’s output infringe upon the artist’s intellectual property?

“As AI-generated content becomes more sophisticated, it may be difficult to determine who is responsible for the content,” said ChatGPT.

“This could lead to issues with copyright and intellectual property, as well as concerns about accountability and transparency. Another important factor to consider is the user’s trust in the AI-generated content. Organizations need to be transparent about the sources and methods used to generate the content, and to provide information that allows users to assess the quality and reliability of the content.”

There are also SEO-related considerations for any organisation using AI. Commercial AI checkers are already available that can spot AI-generated content. Google is on record as saying that autogenerated content goes against its guidelines.

But beyond that, it begs the question: what is the point in putting out content if you’re not offering your audience your own voice or analysis?

“The effect of AI-generated content on SEO will depend on the quality and relevance of the content,” said ChatGPT. “If the AI-generated content is well-written, informative, and relevant, it could improve a website’s SEO. If the AI-generated content is of inferior quality, irrelevant, or poorly written, it could hurt SEO. 

“SEO is a complex and multifaceted concept, and many other factors can affect a website’s search engine rankings,” ChatGPT continued. “AI-generated content should be part of a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes other techniques such as keyword research, meta-tag optimization, back-linking, and more.” 

One final - and significant - open question around the impact of AI on search is whether technologies like ChatGPT represent the next level in zero-click results. If users can interrogate AI through a user-friendly interface, or even directly through their software, could OpenAI’s creation be a search-engine killer?

ChatGPT doesn’t seem to think so. 

“If companies can directly integrate AI-generated content into platforms, users may not need to go to a search engine to find the information they need,” said the AI. “That being said, search engines are constantly changing and reacting to new technologies and user behaviour, so they will probably continue to play an essential role in how we find information online.”

We’re less sure about this than ChatGPT, as we discuss below.

The Future of AI-Assisted Content Marketing

On the one hand, an AI tool offers substantial benefits for businesses. The potential of models like ChatGPT for content marketing is exciting. There’s no question that this technology will take us to a new place. 

But what that looks like depends on how we respond to the considerable challenges around technologies like ChatGPT. We need to think about IP rights, maintaining a unique brand voice, and not breaching customers’ trust. 

“It’s important to be aware of AI-generated content’s limitations and understand that it is only sometimes a suitable replacement for human-generated content,” the chatbot said.

“Some tasks, such as writing a novel or composing music, require a deep understanding of the subject and the ability to express oneself in a unique and meaningful way.

“In the future, AI might generate more sophisticated and nuanced content as it is trained on more diverse data and developers create more advanced algorithms,” ChatGPT continued.

“But it’s important to note that AI-generated content is not a replacement for human creativity. It can assist and inspire humans, but it can never replace the human touch and understanding of the world.”

On this, we agree with ChatGPT. In the end it generates plausible-sounding content, but it will certainly be out-of-date and can often be accurate. We treat it as a kind of enthusiastic and tireless member of our team for brainstorming, but it isn’t yet up to the task of creating finished content.

Will ChatGPT Undermine Content Marketing?

Companies that use content marketing are essentially competing with others to give the best answer to Google searches in order to drive traffic to their sites. If people can generate their own answers using ChatGPT, they may have less use for Google, and less need for those content-rich company sites.

ChatGPT’s ability to generate a few paragraphs that summarise key aspects of a topic is leading people to use it as an alternative to Google. If you want to know the basic elements of a marketing plan you can ask ChatGPT and get a fairly good outline. It’s a more pleasant exprience than searching on Google and pulling together bits and pieces from search results.

In this way, ChatGPT represents a challenge to search engines such as Google. Google saw this straight away and issued a code red when they recognised how ChatGPT can serve as an alternative to search and therefore challenge its business. Microsoft also see ChatGPT as a potential threat to Google’s dominance and a disruptor of the search industry more generally, which is probably why they have invested $10 Billion in it.

Besides generating text, ChatGPT can produce code for programmers. Where developers might have turned to a site like Stack Overflow to find a solution to a programming problem, they are beginning to turn to ChatGPT for the answer. There’s already evidence that Stack Overflow’s traffic is lower than it used to be.

This is a big strategic challenge to content marketers. People invest in content marketing because it brings people to their sites and starts to build relationships with their brands. The content optimised for search engines because that has been the starting point for user enquiries and customer journeys for years.

ChatGPT doesn’t direct people to other sites. It generates an answer of its own based on the body of text that it was trained on. So if people are asking and answering questions on ChatGPT instead of Google, they won’t be encouraged to read content published on companies’ web sites. This is bad news for Google, since fewer Google users mean that they may receive less ad revenue from their own search pages. It’s bad news for site owners, because people won’t be directed to their sites. If those sites depend on advertising revenue from Google, that’s bad news for the sites AND for Google, since they might both lose out in terms of visitors and therefore income.

ChatGPT presents one further threat to Google and conventional search engines. As is clear by now, ChatGPT is impressive and producing plausible-looking, although essentially regurgitated content. We would not use ChatGPT to generate final copy, although we are beginning to find it helpful at earlier stages of our content development processes. Other, less scrupulous, content developers will see ChatGPT as an opportunity to automatically generate vast quantities of low-quality articles in an attempt to game search engine results. As a consequence, whilst we wait for search engines to get better at sifting out AI-generated content, search engines will return an increasing amount of low-quality results. AI-generated content is often flagged as plagiarised content and downgraded by search engines since it is pulling together elements of texts that were used in its training. New tools, such as Originality.ai, are emerging to recognise text that comes from AI engines.

Just at the point when Google is being challenged by ChatGPT as an alternative source of answers, ChatGPT will also be used to lower the quality of Google’s overall offer.

As a content marketer, you can’t afford to be complacent, and shunning AI is not an option if you want your business to remain viable.

How can content strategists and content marketers respond? Great content can outperform ChatGPT in three ways. The first is quality, by which we mean the level of insight, expertise, relevance and helpfulness that thoughtful content can offer over an above a probabilistic language model, however impressive it seems. The one thing that ChatGPT can’t generate is original content.

The second is recency. ChatGPT’s source data is always out of date so creating content that’s extremely current will always be of more value so long as it’s high-quality. ChatGPT is inherently retrospective, so brands, businesses and marketers must challenge themselves to move culture and thinking forward with what they create and deliver the latest and most up-to-date thinking.

The third is to recognise that ChatGPT may play an increasing role in helping people in the early stages of framing and defining their problem, but people will still search for solutions providers once they know what they need. In this way, ChatGPT is more relevant to earlier stages of user intent - information and navigation - but it has little to offer in terms of commercial and navigational searches. These types of searches, and therefore this kind of content, should be the priority for commercial organisations. The introduction of ChatGPT just serves to make this distinction more acute.

ChatGPT is bad news for bad content marketers who churn out bland, cynical content. This creates an opportunity for businesses willing to think more strategically about the content they produce and the role it can play in creating and maintaining valuable customer relationships.

1827 Marketing can help. Get in touch to see how your organisation can harness the incredible power of emerging marketing technologies.