Will AI Replace Marketing Content Creators?
“Hmm … probably not,” the writer of this blog post repeats to herself, notes of relief wavering in her voice.
No, really, probably not. But it’s certainly true that artificial intelligence, or AI, is going to change things in the marketing content creation process, likely rather drastically.
“We’re embracing AI as a tool.”
– Mary Verdin, President, Verdin
According to Verdin President and Chief Strategy Officer Mary Verdin, “At Verdin, we’re embracing AI as a tool. We can leverage the ability to gather content, then write it with the tone and emphasis that only someone who understands our clients can do. AI can bring us information, but humans can bring the subtlety and nuance that is appropriate to the clients to really differentiate them from their competitors.”
Let’s explore what AI programs do – what they do well and what they do poorly – and how we can use them as a tool to enhance our work.
In this blog post, we’re focusing mostly on the now-famous AI tool called ChatGPT and its potential in the world of language-based marketing content creation. Think blog posts, email newsletters, social media post copy, press releases, website content and so on.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and in just five days gained 1 million users, an astounding rate, according to Statista. Why? Because it’s impressive. Really impressive. According to a new CNN Business report about real estate agents who already can’t imagine working without the tool, “ChatGPT is trained on vast amounts of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts. It has written original essays, stories, song lyrics and research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists. Some CEOs have used it to write emails or do accounting work. It even passed an exam at an Ivy League school.”
Here at Verdin Marketing, we signed up for a free account to use the OpenAI-developed tool right away to take this thing for a test drive. First things first, we typed in “Tell me a joke about marketing.” It said:
Why did the marketer quit his job? He realized he was just spinning his wheels.
Groan. Maybe humor isn’t ChatGPT’s strong suit. Then, because we’re in the tourism marketing niche, we asked it to produce a variety of content pieces that the writers on our creative team are regularly tasked with: a blog post with the five top fun things to do in a certain destination, three examples of social media posts about another tourism stop, and so on. In seconds, the work was done. What’s more, it was pretty good. It lacked creativity, humor or any hints of a brand’s unique tone of voice (all important goals for our writers), but in general the information was accurate, relevant and clear.
What ChatGPT Does Well
ChatGPT was created with the purpose of holding a conversation with the end user. Maker OpenAI had humans create model conversations for the AI to study and learn from, a system called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. That makes using the tool really intuitive. You tell it what you want just as you would tell an employee writing for you what to write. Adding clarifying information makes its responses better.
Michigan firm Revel specializes in highly individualized B2B (brand-t0-brand) marketing. According to their recent blog post, AI isn’t going to put writers out of work, but “we need to reframe what it can do for us.”
Just as Google made a writer’s life easier starting around the turn of the millennium by putting so much information at the fingertips of every user, ChatGPT now goes another step further. Not only does it grab the information you need, but it organizes it in a way that feels so intuitive.
AI is like Google on steroids with a personality.