ChatGPT Takes the World by Storm

For me and ChatGPT, two emotions come to mind:

?? Amazed.

?? Scared.

Not familiar with ChatGPT? I asked it to describe itself. Its answer:

“I am ChatGPT, a large language model created by OpenAI. I am trained to understand and respond to natural language inputs, and can assist with a wide range of tasks such as answering questions, generating text, and providing information. My knowledge is based on the information available to me at the time of my training, which has a cut off date of 2021.”

If you’d like to try it out, go here:

https://chat.openai.com/chat

How marketers respond to ChatGPT

The natural reaction from marketers is, “Wow.” After taking a short breath, the next reaction is, “Will it put me out of a job?” While there are many aspects of marketing, writing is a significant piece of it:

• Articles and blog posts
• Social media posts
• Emails
• Web page copy
• Event and webinar promotions
• Ads
• Slides for a presentation

ChatGPT was launched a few months ago. It’s going to get better.

While the copy it produces isn’t perfect, most?would say it’s passable. Even pretty good. Nearly as good as we’d write ourselves. To those of us who derive a portion of our income from writing, we’re now in competition with ChatGPT and related technologies.

Here’s how I’d think about differentiating our writing.

Two key thoughts

1. Our life experiences are unique from every other person (and entity!) on the planet.
2. We’ve all lived through and experienced historical moments. AI has not. Instead, it gets to parse and process history?books.

Now let’s consider how to apply these two key thoughts to our writing.

Feature your own life’s lessons

NO ONE?has experienced life like you have.

We know people who went to the same school, peers who did similar roles on marketing teams, friends who have the same hobbies. But no one has done things, learned things and experienced life in the way you have.

You’re a one-and-only.

Feature your life's experiences and lessons in your writing. If you’re writing about how marketers can do Account Based Marketing (ABM) better, detail an ABM campaign you ran. Document the mistakes you made and let readers know how they can learn from those mistakes.

If you’re providing tips on email marketing, tell readers about the biggest mistake you’ve made when sending an email and let them know how to safeguard against the same mistake.

AI-based writing is pretty good, but?only you can tell your story. Only you can move the reader to take action based on your life’s experiences.

Provide “first of its kind” insights

I once published a?Q&A blog post?featuring Andrew Davis , marketing expert and keynote speaker. I asked Andrew to provide a tip to keynote speakers. His answer:

“If you’re going to be a keynote speaker, build a speech around the answer to a question that Google cannot answer.”

During his keynote at Content Marketing World 2022, Andrew encouraged marketers not to focus on frequently asked questions (FAQ), but instead on?rarely asked questions?( Ashley Guttuso writes about it in?this recap post?on Andi Robinson ’s blog).

The concept here is to provide “first of its kind” insights – things that you cannot find on the web, because they’ve never been published or shared before.

As ChatGPT noted (above):

“My knowledge is based on the information available to me at the time of my training, which has a cut off date of 2021.”

To “beat” ChatGPT, write content that’s not available to it at the time of its training. And to Andrew’s point, share insights (i.e., in your writing) that Google has not yet seen.

Online talk about ChatGPT

Rosemary Brisco, AI Consultant and Rich Schwerin are doing an online talk titled "ChatGPT: Your AI Assistant for Streamlining Marketing Tasks."

"Whether you're a content creator, marketer, or business professional, this Meetup is an opportunity to learn about this new, cutting-edge technology and its potential applications."

All are welcome to attend. RSVP on this Meetup page and you'll see the Zoom link: https://www.meetup.com/bay-area-content-marketing/events/291212638/.

Hope to see you there!

My email newsletter about marketing

Note: This article was first published in "Content Corner," an email newsletter (about Marketing) that I send out twice a month. View past issues and subscribe.