How you can (and when you shouldn’t) use ChatGPT to write marketing copy
There are a few different AI tools aimed at writers out there, but one of the most interesting right now is ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot. It isn’t actually designed as a marketing tool, but its flexibility allows you to do quite a lot with it.
It’s a free way to check out what AIs are capable of right now. You might be surprised at just how useful it can be!
How do AI content generators work?
ChatGPT is an app built by OpenAI using its GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) language model. It serves both as a way to gather data from real users and a demo for the power of GPT-3. There are other GPT-3-powered tools that use the model to generate content in different ways, for example by writing blog posts or rewording emails.
ChatGPT is set up to act like a chatbot and conversational partner.
GPT-3 uses a “neural network” to predict what text should come next in any given sentence. Instead of words, it uses semantic “tokens” which allow its language models to more easily assign meaning and predict plausible follow-on text.
Many words map to single tokens, though longer or more complex words often break down into multiple tokens. On average, tokens are roughly four characters long.
ChatGPT can write SEO meta descriptions
One of the things that ChatGPT is best at is summarizing text that you give it. When it’s asked to come up with something totally new, it’s mediocre, at least in the default settings. You could get something great, or it could go off on a wild tangent and totally miss the point. But when you give it a few hundred words to work from, it’s far less likely to miss the mark.
That makes it really good at writing SEO meta descriptions. Let’s be honest: they all sound like they were written by a bot anyway, so why not make your life easier and actually get a bot to do it? (In the image below, I only gave it the lede to the article, but you can paste the entire article in if you don’t need to be able to take a screenshot of it.)
ChatGPT can create rough outlines for blog posts
ChatGPT is at the point where its rough output can give you a good outline to work from for a blog post. But I still wouldn’t let it write an entire post for me because, by default, it tends to create simple essays where each point gets a paragraph.
The conclusion starts with “in conclusion,” the last sentence starts with “Ultimately,” and there are a lot of “furthermore”s and “additionally”s. They’re not incoherent, but they’re super formulaic.
Words become Tokens
You can think of GPT-3’s neural network as a complex, many-layered algorithm. It has 175 billion parameters or variables that allow it to take an input—your prompt—and then, based on the values and weightings it gives to the different parameters, output whatever it thinks best matches your request.
To get to this point, GPT-3 was trained on roughly 500 billion “tokens” from websites, books, news articles, and other kinds of written content. This huge volume of training data allows it to respond to a variety of different prompts. It can write emails, poetry, dialog, and, of course, marketing copy.
What can’t AI do?
While ChatGPT can offer up the occasional great turn of phrase, it struggles to reliably deliver exceptional copy. Left to its own devices, it generally churns out formulaic, high school-style English (see: meta descriptions), rather than anything that’s likely to entice people to read more.
It’s impressive that a computer can write like this at all—but that isn’t reason enough to just publish what it writes without a bit of editing. ChatGPT is at its best when you ask for multiple options and tweak things yourself, rather than treating it as a hands-off marketing tool.
ChatGPT can generate ideas and help brainstorm copy
ChatGPT can be a pretty good brainstorming partner. It’s like having another person to talk through copy with, even if they possibly aren’t the most qualified expert. While you can’t count on it to get every fact correct, it can spit out some good turns of phrase, all without having to hop on a call with another human.
It’s particularly helpful if you feel like you’re better at writing long-form content than catchy headlines or ad copy. It certainly won’t provide perfect copy from one prompt, but if you ask it for a bunch of suggestions, you can get a whole heap of ideas to A/B test.
Its suggestions above are at least on par with the kind of things I’d come up with in 30 minutes of brainstorming—and it did it far quicker.
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