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As published in Forbes
Where were you on November 30, 2022? It was just an average Wednesday—until OpenAI announced the launch of ChatGPT, its game-changing chatbot that runs GPT-4, which was at that time the most advanced large language model (LLM) publicly available.
Fast forward a week, and ChatGPT was likely all you were hearing about, especially if you run in marketing circles. By early 2023, ChatGPT had 100 million monthly active users. Today, it’s one of several chatbots competing in an increasingly AI-crazed market.
And let’s just admit it: When ChatGPT launched, many of us in content marketing probably panicked. After all, words are our stock-in-trade—and ChatGPT can generate lots of words in a matter of seconds. In those heady early days of ChatGPT, you couldn’t go a day or two without some article declaring the end of content marketing.
Of course, it didn’t go that way. Content marketing hasn’t gone anywhere. But while ChatGPT hasn’t been the content slayer some feared, the field has been changed by the rise of generative AI. Let’s explore how.
No, ChatGPT didn’t make content marketing obsolete—instead, it gave us quite a bit to write about. You’re unlikely to find a content marketer who hasn’t written extensively about AI in the past year as more and more AI-driven products hit the market.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham says at least half of the startups in the incubator are involved in AI in some form—and that share of AI-first companies will only grow. As that happens, more AI-driven companies will need to build out their content teams to promote their brands and tell their stories.
But as a content category, AI is unique. While we might be used to distinct categories like healthcare content or finance content, AI pops up in every industry now. Think of it less as a new vertical and more as a new framework—one content marketers will need to understand deeply in order to thrive.
AI-generated images still trick us—just ask anyone who fell for the “swagged-out Pope” last year. But at least with this current iteration of LLMs, AI-generated text is easy to identify. The prose is a bit more plain and a bit too “clean.” You know it when you see it.
Readers know when a human wrote something, which should be a major relief for content marketers. In late 2022, many imagined a world of massive content farms churning out AI-generated content and winning the content game. Those content farms exist, but their AI-generated spam can’t fool the Google algorithm.
This should remind us of something the best content marketers know well—the average reader is discerning and values uniqueness.
Raise your hand if you thought you’d be prompting ChatGPT like this: “Hey, can you write me a perfect 800-word blog post about optimizing brand identity in the retail sector?” Voila! Your work is done. Time to wow your audience …
Not so fast. Most writers aren’t using generative AI to write blog posts from thin air. Instead, they’re using AI during those tricky parts of the writing process—like when you’re staring at the dreaded blank page or need to track down an obscure stat.
No, it’s not perfect—AI chatbots hallucinate still, so they’re not ideal for research. And many of the ideas AI generates aren’t exactly the most original. But overall, LLMs aren’t writer replacements—instead, they’ve proven to be (mostly) trusted allies.
One survey found that 40% of marketers are using ChatGPT regularly. And while ChatGPT can’t replace every task for content marketers, there are some moments when throwing a prompt to the chatbot can be helpful.
Need a few different subject lines for an email series? In the past, you might have taken a half hour or so to brainstorm 20, narrow it down to 10 and then test out a few on your readers. But now, these smaller content needs are perfect for ChatGPT. Better yet, you can play around with prompts to get just the content you need.
I’ve learned that going for specificity and clarity is key. The best part is, if you’re already a descriptive content creator who writes clearly, developing your prompting skills has probably been pretty easy over the past year and a half.
As I said, readers don’t respond to AI-generated spam being churned out at a record pace. But AI has enabled some savvy content marketers to take a thoughtful approach to personalization—and use GPT-enabled plug-ins to automate personalization on their site.
AI-enabled "recipes" make it easier for content markers to personalize the content on their site, update and refresh old site content, and ensure everything is relevant and up to date. So while ChatGPT has proven helpful during the writing process itself, it’s also become a useful tool for content managers who oversee larger editorial and administrative processes.
These personalization tools are still in their infancy. But it’s not far-fetched to imagine really game-changing AI-driven content personalization tools emerging in the next few years.
It may be just as useful to consider the ways content marketing hasn’t changed since the debut of ChatGPT. For instance, Google’s share of internet searches hasn’t gone down much. It’s trending lower, but there’s little proof that ChatGPT is users’ first stop when they’re looking up information. Writing content that ranks high in search engines—long the province of content teams everywhere—doesn’t seem to be in any danger.
More generally, the bones of good content marketing haven’t changed. Readers still look for readable, well-researched content that provides value. ChatGPT is a useful tool that makes that task a bit easier—and it’s not going anywhere.