It’s strange that something called “artificial intelligence” has become so revered. What’s great about being “artificial”?! Granted, machine learning and the removal of mundane tasks from our working lives is helping us reach that long-promised utopia of maximum productivity for minimal effort.
But it’s a tool. And not all tools solve all problems. If you’re faced with the struggle of creating content, it may be tempting to look to AI tools such as ChatGPT to create all your marketing content, but the reality is it’s not that simple.
When you ask an AI tool to ‘create’ or ‘write’ something for you, it scrapes the internet to find exactly what you requested. No new thinking or insight is created, but you get a decent summary of other people’s work on that particular topic.
And if your requests (or ‘prompts’) are inadequate, then so will be the response. A scalpel in the hand of a four year old child does not achieve the same results as a scalpel in the hand of a skilled and experienced surgeon.
So while you may consider AI a shortcut, it in fact requires a lot of work, skill and experience if you are to make nuanced requests that yield decent output.
But even that might not be of much use for content creation.
One of the main benefits of marketing content is to aid you in clawing your way up towards the top of search rankings. As a company, Google is driving the uptake of AI, but Google doesn’t like AI for marketing content or search engine optimisation. Search is the core of Google’s business, and the task of the search engine is to present search results that are ranked based on a complex algorithm.
Marketing content is an important criterion in search results but imagine if everyone is using the same AI-generated content. No one can stand out in Google’s eyes, making rankings useless and irrelevant. And in fact, AI-generated content can be “Google-slapped” which is a ranking penalty applied to content that is created using AI.
And Google is good at spotting this content. If you think AI tools are the key to creating marketing content, you’re better off doing nothing. Save the time you will need to spend on ChatGPT and put it towards more productive tasks.
Like any worthwhile pursuit, creating good, effective and relevant marketing content is hard. But the results are worth the effort, because when done well, marketing content can ensure you are seen by your prospects when they are in the market for your products and services (on search engine rankings and elsewhere).
Don’t get us wrong, we love the promise of AI and machine learning across many business applications to help us humans get back to where we can make a real difference in the world. But for marketing content, good old fashioned thinking and creativity is what you need.
We can help bring some human intelligence to your marketing content to help you stand out.