ChatGPT vs. Dedicated Content Writer: How to Use the Heart You Possess to Overcome the Machine

What Is It About You that AI Can’t Match?

What Is ChatGPT

You’ve undoubtedly been on a website and seen the chat box on the lower right. You’ve probably clicked on it, asked questions, or conversed with a customer service rep. Sometimes these chatty associates answer your questions, and sometimes they’re unhelpful. But at least you feel that someone somewhere interacted with you about your issue or question.?

Of course, for the chat box to be there, an employee must be on the other end who’s somewhat trained in using this communication feature. The chat box is a pleasant alternative for those who dislike talking to customer service agents on the phone.?

But as employers look for ways to reduce operations costs in these difficult economic times, paying a worker to answer chat box customers all day is a luxury they can no longer afford. Enter ChatGPT. Created by the tech company OpenAI, located in San Francisco, ChatGPT is an interactive language model chatbot capable of responding to a more conversational tone than the original chatbots. ChatGPT stands for: Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer.?

ChatGPT is a large language model with RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) training. Rather than anticipating the next word in your text, ChatGPT learns what humans expect. OpenAI taught it to understand “intent and provide helpful responses.” This feature sets it apart from the older predictive language models. Ask it a question, and it searches through the enormous dataset OpenAI gave it to generate a human-sounding response.?

This response may be in the form of answers, essays, business letters and more—the more specific your input, the better its generation.

How to Use ChatGPT

To use ChatGPT, you need to first sign-up. Visit the OpenAI site and follow the instructions to create your free account. Once completed, you can use your ChatGPT login to access free platforms or upgrade and pay for what you use when your free trial expires.?

Once inside the artificial intelligence system, you can create writing and images through Dall-E, OpenAI’s image generator. However, you need to be explicit in the command prompts you give to it. For example, if you tell it to “write an essay on the rise of Adolf Hitler,” the text you get back will miss several important topics and appear dull even though factually accurate.?

If you add a few extra command prompts, such as “write an 800-word blog on the birth, political career, and military exploits of Adolf Hitler,” your return will have more facts than the original, but the dullness won’t disappear. If you add more prompts, like “write an 800-word blog in the style of William L. Shirer, covering Adolf Hitler’s birth, family, speechmaking, political rise, Chancellorship, military leadership, intrigue, love life, military mistakes, attempted assassinations, cruelty, murder of the Jews, death camps and bunker suicide,” the AI learning adds these. Then, it presents you with a much better blog.?

Better, but not perfect. The deep learning AI constantly acquires helps it appear more human in your desired tone, but facts outweigh the document's readability. It will reproduce the tone, writing style, and paragraph length, but it’s still not human.?

The image reproduction works similarly. The more information you give Dall-E, the closer the image will appear as desired. And since machine learning is ongoing, each successive image or text produced builds upon the existing database. However, this creates a “glitch” in that it seemingly sticks with the tone of the last project or the images used previously. You need to start a brand new prompt to avoid this.

One of the critical features of this artificial intelligence, which outshines the others, is that it has memory — currently, up to three thousand words of data. That extra data fuels a deep learning strategy: When prompted by a human, it searches its enormous database and provides a unique response each time, if possible.

ChatGPT’s Limitations Exposed

As with any new technology, there are flaws, pitfalls and promises. Below are some of the limitations as it stands:

• Access: While those using the image creator function deal with graphics issues, let’s stick to our primary focus — text generation. Since it’s an emerging technology, you may encounter hiccups in using ChatGPT. Because of the time of day, you will likely get a “Something Went Wrong” message when accessing the FREE version. Working and school hours are prime times, and since too many users can crash a server, only those with the $20/month upgrade can get through.?
• Outdated Information: We’ll assume you got your response and want to use it for homework, blogging or reporting. The OpenAi team did an excellent job providing the AI chatbot with a deep data inventory to avoid plagiarism. And ChatGPT can navigate those waters. But the knowledge cut it was given was at the end of 2021. The built-in search engine does a superb job finding the latest information for smaller searches, but for longer-form projects, such as blogs, the data it presents in generating your project could be outdated. And if readers see this happening repeatedly, they’ll eventually realize AI is at work, not you, and so will Google.
• Unopinionated: The AI learning tool uses facts in its database and presents them in grammatically-correct sentences and paragraphs. This is fine if the needed response is a cold-hard-facts list. ChatGPT, at the edge of our known capabilities with AI, can’t form or present opinions. Humans write with bias, a belief or worldview that seeps into everything they do.?
• Repeated Sentence Structure: When writing product or service descriptions, ChatGPT (and others) follow the same structure throughout the entire list. They’ll start each with “A” or “The” and follow the same grammar and Noun-Verb-Object construction.
• Short Explanations: With limited data for any one topic, AI learning remains stunted in its ability to cover all facets of a query. Humans add personal experience and provide reasons for their satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

A chatbot detector may focus on any of these and quickly inform the reader what — not who — wrote the piece. And if it was supposed to be you, the jig is up.

Why Trained SEO Content Writers Are Worth It

Although ChatGPT, Copymatic, Hypotenuse, Posh, Chatsonic and other chatbot alternatives can do amazing work, they still can’t beat having a trained SEO Content Writer on staff. Facts, correct sentence structure and reams of data aren’t enjoyable for the average human to read. We are emotional beings and need relatability to hold our attention. We need a story. And that’s the most critical element missing in AI-generated long-form pieces.

• Language: Many think of language as static, but it’s far from that. Language is an ever-evolving organism with trendy phrases, slang, urban connotations, etc. AI doesn’t have that type of information constantly updated. But the trained Content Writer can edit and change professional web content on the spot.?
• Emotion: As mentioned earlier, ChatGPT and other reinforcement learning tools struggle to understand and use emotion to the proper degree. Maybe one day they will, but we’re not there yet. And what closes the deal in B2B or B2C? Emotion. That emotional heart-grab creates the feeling of “I need that now!” That’s what only a writer can bring to the table. And the writer who shares life’s everyday experiences with an audience can empathize with them and connect. How can AI do that?
• Storytelling: The most critical reason to have a dedicated content writer is the art of storytelling. The story is part of creating that emotional connection with a company, product or service. Being able to insert the reader as though they were part of the story and moving them along with it is essential to captivating them, their circle of friends and their hard-earned money. AI can generate facsimiles but can’t reach the level of artistic endeavor.
• Audience-Specific Targeting: When writing the story in blog form, white paper, email campaign, social media, etc., it’s necessary to identify your audience. If you’re writing for a teen magazine, you won’t use terms and colloquialisms from Gen-X. Millennials aren’t concerned with hockey hair, leg warmers or Nikki Sixx. Or, when writing for a vegan restaurant, you wouldn’t include inappropriate phrases like, “I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off.” And you would know better than to talk about stock market trends and retirement hedge funds when writing social media posts aimed at low-income households. AI makes mistakes like this because it needs specific information that may not be in its database yet.
• Prose and Rhythm: Writing is an art form, a creative endeavor. Each writer develops a style to reach the audience and grab their hearts before the mind has time to know what happened. There’s a buildup, a midsection and a crescendo that AI doesn’t understand. It has to be felt by the soul. Humor, anecdote, and double-meaning are part of a writer’s repertoire. Get the right writer on the job and watch the drama unfold.?
• Heart to Heart: Have you ever read something and felt moved to tears, or felt like what you read was about you or could’ve been written by you? The words made you feel understood, and your voice echoed in the words the author chose. ChatGPT and other deep-learning AI language models can’t speak heart-to-heart because they don’t share the human experience. Humans need to connect and feel connected, and the art of story provides that.
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization is a skill that the specially-trained Content Writer uses to the company’s advantage. The ability to pick through the appropriate keywords generated by the sites trusted most is a skill obtained through training, time, error and success. The AI out there now may be able to get keywords, but it lacks access to real-time search data. It takes an understanding of your specific client’s voice, audience and brand goals to put together the best keyword list, and ChatGPT is limited to generating a list of keywords based on an audience but not targeted and centered in the crosshairs.?

Ultimately, if you put the keys to your website in AI’s hands, Google may track it through a chatbot detector, which could lead to de-indexing your site. In the current climate, Google’s algorithm prefers organic, human-written content to ChatGPT or similar artificial intelligence systems.

Use ChatGPT to Your Advantage as a Content Writer

Don’t bury your head in the sand and give up when AI is tossed out as an alternative to hiring a content writer. Whether it’s Microsoft ChatGPT or a different AI system, embracing and incorporating emerging technology into your work is critical. Don’t fear it — understand it. Here are a few ways ChatGPT can work for you:

• Battle Writer’s Block: Even the most experienced and creative web content writers will experience moments where they feel like they’ve used every word in the dictionary. Indeed, no more words can exist, can they? It’s not possible. Enter ChatGPT! With a lightning-fast search engine and quick, factual, on-topic results, ask it to help by writing a few sentences so you can unstick those fingers. Just be careful not to copy and paste. You’re better than that.
• Research Facts: When preparing to write or reach a specific conclusion in your project, you may need more research on particular topics. A fast way to get results is your new AI tool. Ask for a few sentences or bullet points on the subject, and watch it respond with factual, usable content and a referenced starting point. But always be aware of outdated material popping up, and crosscheck it when applicable.
• Competitor Information: Find out what your competition is up to and ask pertinent questions to gather data for your company’s use. Ask ChatGPT who that competitor’s top competitors are, and see where you rank.?
• Research Your Audience: Find out more about your company’s customers and potential ones. Learn their pain points and what competitors have done to address them. Then, do better than them.
• Rough Drafts: For long-form content, it’s helpful to create an outline or rough draft. You can ask ChatGPT to generate an outline by giving it specific command prompts for it to follow.?

Businesses Still Need Dedicated Web Content Writers

AI is still an emerging technology with flaws that OpenAI continues to address. It’ll be with us going forward, so learn to accept it. Use it to improve your writing skills. Competition can create opportunities to show prospective customers why they need your company and your superiors why they need you. Take advantage of the opportunity and hone your skills to razor-sharpness.

Read up on your competitors and determine if they’re reinventing the wheel. If they are, see if your company has an alternative and write SEO content that flattens theirs before it gets out of the gate. And don’t reject ChatGPT or any other AI learning system as too complicated or too simple. Dig into it and find ways to use it as a tool in your trained hands.?

Don’t be afraid of AI deep learning systems. Make them afraid of you!