What if I told you that artificial intelligence — a robot if you will — wrote this article? A thoughtful and carefully researched piece that offers valuable insights to support your marketing efforts. And it wrote it in less than 60 seconds from a one-sentence prompt?

Theoretically, it’s possible. Tools like ChatGPT can create written content in the blink of an eye. Needless to say, it’s making serious waves in various industries, and the marketing industry is no exception.

ChatGPT — the lowdown

So, what is ChatGPT? GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and it is known as a large language model tool (LLM). And what do LLMs do? A simple definition we liked is that they recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text, along with other content.

ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI — a San Francisco-based research lab with current and former part-owners including the likes of Elon Musk and Microsoft.

Essentially, you type in a prompt on the ChatGPT user interface and it will provide text to meet your brief. For example, you might type ‘How do I write a marketing plan?’, ‘Create an article about how to care for your lawns in summer’, or ‘What are some get rich quick ideas to support my early retirement?’. Whatever you’re interested in!

It’s free, so you might like to give it a try here.

How you could use ChatGPT — and whether you should

There are definitely uses for ChatGPT that we could see being useful for a range of businesses. Some of the best uses we have come across so far are for:

• Summarising information quickly for you

• Getting your ideas flowing

• Generating reports

• Compiling information on a subject

It’s definitely got the potential to save some time for us mere humans!

However, word to the wise — use with caution as there are limitations too.

The limitations of using ChatGPT

While it could be useful to spark ideas or summarise information for you, but it certainly has its limitations. The main ones we found in experimenting with getting ChatGPT to write for us are pretty major too, especially in a marketing context:

• Lack of personality: You know what, it tried, it really did. But there was something distinctly un-human about everything ChatGPT generated for us. When businesses are creating content, their ability to make a connection with the reader is absolutely vital. AI writing can lack empathy and personality, producing prose that is dry and, well, robotic.

• A nuanced understanding of your target audience: You can get pretty specific about what you want ChatGPT to write but it can’t understand your business and your target audience on a deeper level. A professional content writer gets to know a business inside and out, and writes content that speaks directly to them, addressing their needs and pain points. AI algorithms, on the other hand, can only generate content based on the data they have been fed, and they lack the ability to understand the nuances of your business and target audience.

• Accuracy: There have been many instances of incorrect information provided by ChatGPT and the genuine nature of its references can be questionable. In a nutshell, if you use ChatGPT to create written content for you, check it and check it again.

Getting straight to the source

For the record, AI didn’t write this article. This is written by a 100% authentic human.

But that’s exactly what a robot would say isn’t it? No, truly — and you can check. The creator of ChatGPT himself created a tool where you can check. So if you are suss on the source of content you find online, that could be helpful.

We gave it a go and it was successful at identifying which prose was written by AI and which was written by a human each time. When we created an amalgamation of AI and human copywriting, it generated a response that indicated it was likely to have been written by AI. It seemed like a fairly reliable assessment tool, but not foolproof.

The real deal

While AI can be a valuable tool in some areas of marketing, it’s definitely not the best solution for content creation.

Personally and professionally, we wouldn’t risk producing content that wasn’t written by a human expert in the field. Trust is everything in business, and content that is trustworthy as well as engaging and thoughtful goes a long way to connect with your target market. So for now, we’ll be sticking with human writers.