Gen AI: Four Easy On Ramps for Marketers

?I recently launched my personal blog site with an article that looked back on the changing nature of HP’s fortunes at the end of the 1990s.? ?As an experiment, I then took that first blog article and asked ChatGPT to use it as the input to the prompt “rewrite the following article in the style of a New York Times article”.? That rewrite is also posted on my blog site as a separate post.

This was the latest in a series of experiments I have been running around using Generative AI to create novel content.? ?After this exercise I decided it was a good time to write an article on my experience of using AI as a writing assistant.?

Part one of this article summarizes my general observations on how Generative AI, considering current capabilities and tech maturity, can help marketers right now.? Part two of the article focuses on my takeaways related to the specific task of having ChatGPT rewrite my original article.?

Generative AI as a “Writing Assistant” (Part One)

1. Quick Ideation

For me, sometimes the hardest part of writing is just getting started.? Thinking about what it is you want to say; what’s important, what’s not; and most importantly planning the overarching narrative arc.?

Generative AI makes it really easy to brainstorm something like a “top # issues affecting Y” type summary.? For a lot of my writing projects this kind of exercise can be super helpful. You probably won’t use the list as is and will choose to substitute some of the recommendations, but this capability can be really useful as a way of getting past your initial writer’s block.??

2. Targeting Multiple Audiences

Take the scenario above but refine it for different audiences.? Ask the AI engine the same question, but instead of a single audience, iterate the prompt to target different personas: CEO, CTO, CISO, and CFO as an example.?

?Inspect the answers to see what’s common and what’s different about the responses you get?? My experience is that the output will generally be similar but not exactly the same as the AI engine will attempt to tailor the general answer to the specific “care abouts” of each persona.

3. Generating Proof Points

Whenever I am writing a piece to drive a specific point of view, a big part of the early work is finding statistics from credible sources that support that point of view.? I’ll start that effort with a lot of Google searches to identify studies that might support my case.? One of the Generative AI use cases I have experimented with is asking the AI engine to find “x” number of stats that support a specific premise.

4. Exploring Different Writing Styles

As demonstrated in my experiment around Atlas Shrugged you can use Generative AI engines to write in a specific style or voice. You might then combine this strategy with my earlier point of writing for a specific persona.? Start with a foundational message that is general in nature then tailor it for a specific persona. That’s pretty powerful.

Caveat Emptor

Top Issues Lists: When generating a valid list of top trends or topics, you’ll still need to be a subject matter expert to assess which choices are valid and which are either not valid or valid but not worthy of top “X” status. ?My experience doing this kind of exercise is that you’ll likely be OK with 6 to 8 of the suggestions but will have issues with 2-4 of the selections.? That’s not bad for a few minutes of work.?

Item Comparisons: You can ask the AI engine to evaluate A versus B but you’ll likely get back a top feature list for each rather than a normalized comparison that directly compares A to B.?

Sources and Citations:? I have found that any stats identified in AI generated content generally are not specific enough to use as a citation.? The copy generated by the AI engine may be a good start, but you’ll likely have to do more research and be rigorous in documenting sources for your citations.

Part Two:? Experiment Rewriting Atlas Shrugged Blog

I’ll quickly sum up the major decisions that the AI engine appeared to have made in considering how best to rewrite the core material as a New York Times article.

Word Count:? The article word length of the AI generated article dropped by about two thirds.? That makes sense given the requirement to write it like a news article. A lot of the cut material was context around HP and the time of the event.?

Certainty of Conclusion:? The AI written article is much more emphatic about the conclusion the reader is expected draw from the article.? In my original blog I was much more ambivalent about the strength of the correlation between the event I wrote about and HP’s subsequent fortunes.

Sensationalistic:? The AI article is written with a lot more hyperbolic language than the my original piece. I read the New York Times often and the rewrite feels much more sensationalistic than the style of the articles I’ve read there. However, I don’t doubt that much of what we read in the press is written with this sensationalistic flair, so I assume the AI engine was influenced by more than just the New York Times.

Author Becomes Insider:? The article positions the source (me) as an insider. Interesting choice as a way to leverage the material in the context of an article.? However, while I was there and had access to some of the folks who would have been considered insiders to event in question, I certainly wasn’t an insider with direct knowledge of the decisions the executive team was considering.

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As I stated in my first LinkedIn Article, Generative AI will have a huge impact on professions that involve any form of creative writing.? It may be some time, perhaps a very long time, before AI will be so good that it takes the human actor out of the picture entirely.? Even so, I believe the capabilities of Generative AI are already quite impressive.?

For Marketers, AI is good enough to be a significant productivity booster right now.? It makes sense to start to explore ways to use it to make you a better at your chosen craft. For myself, I certainly plan to continue to experiment with the uses and limits of Generative AI, looking for ways to make me a better and more productive writer.

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