There’s a lot of buzz right now about artificial intelligence or AI, especially when it comes to managing and automating your content creation. But, can it help you create more content, or will it just make you sound like everyone else?
Chatbots Powered by AI
If you’ve been following tech news lately, you have been hearing about ChatGPT created by OpenAI. Microsoft is using the technology for Bing’s AI, and Google announced theirs, called Bard. And if you recall, we’ve talked previously here on TNT about DALL·E, the AI image generator from Open AI. ChatGPT is essentially a chatbot, which can give you answers and do things for you. Where a search engine gives you a bunch of results, and you decide which sources you want to look at, the AI chatbots just give you what you’ve asked for.
How Do These AI Resources Work?
These AI bots work by using large language models (LLMs). LLMs are autocomplete programs that predict what would be the next thing to output in response to your prompt. The answer is based upon the data it’s trained on. So they’re trained on a very large data set provided by the internet, they can figure out what, and how, to answer your question and to write plausible sounding statements based on this completion.
AI Best Practices Right Now
Now, we’ve seen people say it writes whole blog posts or sales pages for them, or to even code for a whole program. There are all kinds of things that you can ask it to do, and it really can be a timesaver.
AI can assist with content creation, but proceed with caution.
But, there are some caveats to this as well. If you can have the AI spit out a thousand articles for you on a topic you want to rank for in Google in a couple of minutes, should you do it? Probably not. First of all, you need to really know your topic. ChatGPT often provides made up answers. After all, it’s not like there’s any wrong information out there on the internet data it was trained on.
Google has also weighed in with some guidance on how it will treat AI-generated content in search. They’re not going to automatically downrank it, but they are reiterating their guidance, which we’ve talked about before, which is writing content for people. Google’s focus is on the quality of the content rather than how the content is produced.
Using AI Assistance to Create Content for Your Audience
We’ve talked about this before, you want to create content that attracts your ideal customer by speaking to their concerns. For small businesses, people want to do business with people and your content should also include your voice. If you read something out loud and think “I would never say that,” that content doesn’t have your voice and won’t necessarily attract the type of customer that wants to work with you.
AI is not going to be a magic easy button to solve your content challenges. That doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful tool for research, topics ideas, competition, product descriptions, or turning your ideas into a video script. The key to getting good results is more about the type of prompt that you give it.
Better prompts get better results.
Something to keep in mind about ChatGPT and other bots, is they are trained on data. They’re not connected to the real-time internet (yet), so they don’t know about current events. It can also get a bunch of things just outright wrong. But, it could create some ideas for a good meta description based upon something you’re using now, or take a paragraph, and improve it.
For example, I had something the other day I had written, but I wanted to send it out as a press release. So, I asked ChatGPT to use the information I provided and reformat it in the style of a press release. It worked pretty well. There are certain conventions in press releases, like not using first party grammar where I don’t normally write in that style. Other things you can do, are ask for a draft of a letter requesting reviews (that you edit), or list the top questions people have about your service so you have a starting point of ideas for content.
Should you be looking at tools like ChatGPT to help in content creation? Absolutely. It is not going away, and is only going to get better. Just don’t use whatever it spits out for you as is.
Apparently some people are doing just that! At the bottom of each ChatGPT answer is a button with the text “regenerate response” to get another version. But if you search for that text along with your keywords, like auto insurance for example, you find lots of people have just copied the entire article along with the text “regenerate response” included and published it! These articles are not going to meet Google’s quality guidelines!
Quality is more important than quantity
You want to use it as a helpful tool and we have a link in the show notes that gives you ideas on some prompts that you can use.
Make sure to make the content your own – your voice, your message.
The bottom line is this, ChatGPT and other AI bots are here to stay. But to get the right customers for your business, you have to tailor the information and show why they should work with YOU and that you understand their concerns. Use these tools to save time, but you’re still going to have to edit things and put it in your own voice.
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