Chances are, by now you’ve heard of ChatGPT, the generative AI app that has received attention for its conversational and human-like responses to queries. Launched by OpenAI toward the end of last year, the chatbot uses a language processing model to predict responses that are eerily reflective of human speech and take mere seconds to conjure. Just five days after launching, the app garnered more than a million users who have used the technology to do everything from write essays, research topics, draft emails and templates, and fix code.
Given the app’s low-cost content output, savvy digital marketers were quick to put the new technology to use. Here’s what digital marketers should know about how to use ChatGPT (and how not to).
Let’s Start With Its Limitations
Before relegating your content strategy to ChatGPT, it’s important to understand the technology and its inherent limitations. Because it uses a language processing model, its output is based on a prediction of language. The result is a human-like response, but just like fallible humans, the bot can be wrong. Crucially, the model is not based on the factual foundation of the content. According to the app’s website:“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”
Using ChatGPT To Draft Blog Content
Even with the limitations, many digital marketers have found that ChatGPT can be an effective tool for drafting a blog article, social media post, or other piece of online content. It’s relatively straightforward to overcome the possibility of false outputs by simply engaging an editor to verify the result.
Marketers who want to employ ChatGPT to generate content should also be aware of potential impacts to SEO. Google has traditionally penalized auto-generated content, which it deems low quality in accordance with the company’s spam policy. Moreover, it’s important to consider the competitive landscape. ChatGPT’s software competes with Google, so there’s broad speculation that Google will move to penalize content generated by its competition.
The stakes are high. Penalties such as this can result in a website being completely removed from Google’s search results, so be sure to tread carefully.
A safer strategy would be to use the software to build general outlines and have a human fact-check content and iterate on the draft to ensure it’s both novel and value-driven.
