How ChatGPT saved me time and torment when I couldn't come up with a good article title

I was struggling to come up with a title for an article. I was completely blocked. I’d written several but none of them were good. And I knew what I had to do - I just didn’t want to do it.?

Marci had given me a bunch of prompts and told me to go and write 100 titles to get unstuck and open up new ideas. I knew it would work, because I’d done it before. But it takes forever, and I had a gazillion other things to do.

So of course I did what any good business owner does when they have a task they don’t want to do. Instead of working, I opened social media. But this time, procrastination turned out to be my saviour.

On LinkedIn, I saw that Mark Schaefer had written a blog post. About something called ChatGPT. “It will change everything in marketing, forever” he said.?

ChatGPT is “a natural language processing tool driven by AI technology” - which means you can ask it to write human sounding content. Right now it’s in the research phase, and they’ve made it free so they can learn from how people use it.?

So I headed over to the website to give it a try.?

I described the article and asked ChatGPT to write 100 titles. It obviously enjoyed the task about as much as I did, and freaked out and stopped in the middle of title 72.?

That seemed like enough to get started, so I read through them. None of them were amazing, but there were sentence structures I wouldn’t have thought of using. And a few phrases that were useful.?

I went through and grabbed any of the ones that were close. Then I started tweaking the titles, and pulling bits from ones I liked and jigsawing them together. In under 5 minutes I had 7 titles I was happy with - all better than the titles I had originally written.

Would I have got better results if I had sat down and worked through the prompts Marci gave me to come up with 100 titles? Probably. But I had just saved myself a bucket load of time - and torment - and had a perfectly usable title.?

Here’s how simple it is to use…

For the content you’re reading now, I typed “write a title for this article:” and then I pasted the entire article into the chatbox and hit enter.?

And ChatGPT came straight back with:

“ChatGPT Saved Me Time and Torment When I Couldn't Come Up with a Good Article Title”

This is just one, super simple, use of ChatGPT to save time while creating content.?

I’ve seen creators ask it for lists of topic ideas, and even business ideas. And there are plenty of companies out there already using AI in their content creation process for blog posts and social media.?

I did ask it to write me some short blog posts. They were pretty dull. Not bad, but dull.

So for now, I’ll continue to write my own posts - but I’ll be looking for ways to speed up the process. I’ll be working to identify the parts of my content Artificial Intelligence can write, and figuring out how to use it to save time, while ensuring my content retains my voice and, well, humanness.?

Artificial Intelligence tools are improving at an incredible rate. As are the interfaces for using them, it’s unbelievably easy to use these tools. It’s time you started experimenting with them to see how they can save you time and effort.

Let me know - what practical uses have you found for AI tools?

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This article was originally published on the Frank and Marci blog.