The popularity of shiny AI content creation tools like ChatGPT has led to unending conversations among marketers.
For some, the possibility of job loss is palpable. For others, AI is an opportunity to cut content creation costs and publish content faster. Statista even reports that over 80% of industry experts use AI in their online marketing activities. That shows AI may have a significant role in content creation. But it also has limitations.
Here, we’ll explore AI content creation, its use cases, limitations, and what you should keep in mind when using AI in your content creation process.
Exploring AI Content Creation
In simple terms, AI content creation uses artificial intelligence tools to generate written or multimedia content. As a marketer, you can use these tools to create emails, ad copy, social media posts, articles, web design inspiration, images, web copy, and more. The possibilities are just endless.
That said, to get the best output from AI tools, you need to be great at writing prompts.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT use a language-based model. That means they try to understand your prompt before producing strings of words that best answer your question based on the data they are trained on. This training data led to the creation of Generative Pre-trained Transformers models like GPT-3 and GPT-4. Using better AI models results in better responses.
AI tools have multiple uses in content marketing. Some are great for content optimization, while others are better suited to creating long-form content, social media content, and more. Below are some common use cases for AI content creation tools:
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1. Generating Content Ideas
Creating fresh, relevant, and interesting content ideas is challenging for most creators. Fortunately, this is the bread and butter for a free AI writing tool like ChatGPT. Enter your ChatGPT marketing prompt, and you’ll get an avalanche of ideas in seconds.
I asked ChatGPT to generate 50 social media content ideas about content marketing, and here’s the output:
2. Create Content Outlines
Creating an article outline is tasking. Manual SERP analysis, determining an ideal post structure, and figuring out how much content you need to outrank the competition can take hours. AI writing tools like Jasper have outline templates that can reduce these hours to minutes. With ChatGPT, you need to enter a prompt.
Here’s what ChatGPT came up with when I requested an outline for this article:
3. Write First Drafts
Now that you have an idea and an outline, you must create a first draft. First drafts (especially those produced with AI) aren’t meant to be final drafts. You need to refine them because no AI text generator is perfect.
Besides ChatGPT, most AI text generators won’t allow you to customize your prompt fully. Sometimes, they’ll require a keyword, preferred tone, audience, etc. Take NeuronWriter, for instance. I asked it to create an introduction for this post. You can see the output isn’t exactly right, but I grabbed some ideas from it.
4. Create Social Media Content
Marketers are often great at producing content but need to improve in promotion. After publishing a great piece of content, don’t rely on just Google to distribute it. Put in some work to attract readers. By using AI writing tools, you can create shareable social media posts. This gives your content a better chance of attracting your audience.
As an example, here’s a prompt I entered into ChatGPT regarding our marketing budget post:
“I just created a blog post about marketing budgets. Using ideas from this blog post, create 5 punchy tweets. Here’s the post…”
The output of ChatGPT:
AI Content Creation In Marketing: Key Reminders
Before you go full steam on using AI to create content, it is important to recognize its limitations. Here are a few of them:
AI Won’t Replace Human Writers Completely
The rapid pace of AI advancements is a pleasant surprise for busy marketers. But the thing is, these advancements need to be improved on to replace trained human writers.
Humans write original content, including their experiences, emotionally connect with their audience, and create content that tackles current challenges. AI can’t properly do these things yet.
AI Content Could Be Inaccurate
To an extent, AI tools can fail when it comes to accuracy. Here’s an example; according to The Verge, “CNET issued corrections on 41 of 77 AI-written stories they published.” Some stories had challenges with accuracy, and CNET subtly acknowledges this.
Publishing inaccurate content can bring negative publicity to your brand. To avoid that, fact-check the output of your AI content before publishing. This extra step helps you keep the trust of your audience and prevents search engines from slamming your AI-assisted content with low rankings.
AI Content Isn’t Immune From Plagiarism
The output of some AI tools can be dangerously close to existing content. Meaning, they are likely plagiarized. Again, a CNET AI-assisted piece of content had this challenge.
AI content detectors may come in handy to avoid plagiarism, even though they are not 100% foolproof. You can also use Copyscape or editing tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid to check for plagiarism.
Should You Use AI In Your Content Creation Process?
The answer is a resounding “yes.” Although AI falls short in some areas, it’s beneficial in others. Here are 3 benefits of including AI tools in your content creation process:
1. AI Tools Can Make You More Efficient
AI tools can help you produce content quickly. These tools can be game-changers for writing emails, creating social content, and decimating writer’s block when creating blog posts. This benefit becomes more pronounced when you have a small team and want to publish content faster and regularly.
2. AI Tools Are Cost-Effective
Humans will always have their place in content creation. But for mundane tasks like ideation, generating outlines, drafting a quick email, and getting a social media content idea, AI does this fast at zero or an inexpensive cost.
3. AI Tools Are Flexible
The ability to create multiple content formats for several platforms is arguably one of the core benefits of AI for marketers. You can use it to:
- Write landing page copy
- Conduct basic market research
- Create email marketing campaigns
- Write product descriptions
- Create ad campaigns
- Write YouTube scripts
To sum this up, AI content creation tools offer incredible potential for marketers. However, you need to recognize their limitations and use them ethically.
Ultimately, the key to successful AI content creation is balancing human creativity and AI assistance. Using the strengths of both will help you save time, create content fast, and reduce your content production costs.