Have you heard about the hype? Chat GPT is big news and Google is fast catching up with their own version of it; BARD . As of the date I am writing this (10th Feb 2022) ChatGPT is around 3 months old, Microsoft has just invested $10 billion dollars in it, and debate has been sparked on how using AI in various parts of life will affect us, our jobs and our futures.

As a side note, in this post I’m going to run you through my experience of using AI and give my tips on best practices but I won’t be encouraging you to use it or not use it yourself. That’s a decision you’ll need to make based on what’s best for you, your business and your beliefs. 

So, should you use chatGPT to create content for your business?

Around the middle of last year, I listened to a podcast with one of my mentors Josh Hall on Bertha.ai, an AI tool that can be used to help create content for WordPress websites specifically. I’ll admit, I kind of half listened to the episode as I was so against the idea of using AI in my business and decided it really wasn’t a thing I’d be doing. 

A few months later I stumbled upon Bertha.ai again in a web designers Facebook group I am part of. There was a lot of discussion around designers using it to help their clients create copy for their websites and them also being able to use it to create content for their own businesses. While some seemed dubious and totally against it, the majority of people who commented were raving about it. 

Using AI to create content

As a business owner, I have a weekly plan for content that all revolves around a blog post as my long form content. Using the blog as my foundation, I then build out my content for my social media and email marketing from there. There you go! I have just given away my not so secret strategy behind my content creation. Feel free to steal it! This content plan does mean that I do spend quite a lot of my time writing and creating my content. I’m talking about around 8-10 hours per week which can feel like a lot. When there was a suggestion that I could potentially save time and still create quality content, naturally I jumped at the chance.

So I gave the free trial of Bertha.ai a go. All 10,000 free words of it. The free trial had its limitations with some of the functions locked for premium users but I got to work creating a weekly blog post on there and used up the free word count quota in a couple of sessions.

The thing I want to mention here is that when speaking to your audience in any way, spoken or written word, it’s so important that your message comes through as you. This is true whether you’re a one person organisation or a big company. It can take time to work out the tone of voice that works, that feels authentic and that also speaks directly to your people. It’s worth noting too that sounding like a robot or being too formal and stuffy isn’t going to cut it. 

I mentioned that here because the way I write my blog posts is pretty informal. I write pretty much as I speak (apart from all the ‘ums ’ and ‘erms’). I have been blogging for a long time so the need to be formal and use long words to sound more professional left me a long time ago. I realised that to attract the right people I’d need to be speaking directly to them, informally and without jargon.

AI isn’t human, but it’s close

So that brings me to the first thing that is totally irreplaceable by robots and AI, and that is, you. It’s so important to connect with your audience on a human level and what I found that when using Bertha.ai and also when I tried out ChatGPT they gave me endless answers and information, but not written in a way that I would ever simply cut and paste into a blog post or Instagram caption because it didn’t have any of my personality. So, I’d suggest at this stage, if anyone is afraid that AI will take away their job as a human, my answer would be, not yet and not entirely.

That’s why my personal take on it is that AI is definitely a really useful tool, but it doesn’t have the human side to it. When I read back over the text that I had taken and cobbled together from AI I had to go through it and make it sound like me and make it informal. That then meant that I probably spent just as much, if not more time on the post that I would have if I’d just written it, but the post was potentially full of more information than just my meagre human brain could come up with.

AI prevents you starting from a blank page

But then, without Bertha.ai I would have started with a blank page and that can be the problem. I saved a lot of time getting the idea for what to write but not necessarily how to write it. AI is a great tool for idea generation, to help if you’re feeling totally stuck and it could also help you come up with an entire marketing content strategy for your business. My go to method for helping my clients come up with content ideas is to get inside the heads of their ideal clients and think about all the questions they could ask. Essentially creating content from your FAQs is a great place to start and means you’ll never run out of ideas. ChatGTP is a great place to generate more content ideas as well as prompts for what to write, but I didn’t find it did the whole job of creating a blog post I could simply cut and paste and be done.

Yes, when using AI you can ask it to create content in a certain style, tone of voice or even as a specific celebrity, but is it really going to sound like you? I asked it to help me write about website design in a fun and informal way and while it could do that to a point, it still wasn’t me, of course. Maybe one day there will be AI that can write as we as individuals speak but we aren’t there yet.

And if your question is; Did I create this blog post using AI? No, I didn’t. I actually felt really inspired to write this post on my phone the tube last night, but I am definitely not always in a writing mood. My usual time designated for creating my blog posts is Friday mornings, but of course I am not always able to come out with ideas and facing a blank page can feel overwhelming sometimes which is where AI can really help if you’re just not in the mood.

So should you use ChatGPT or similar in your business?

Well if you have to come up with any amount of written content for your business, then the answer is yes. But, if you want to know if it will be able to take over and completely replace you. As a real human no. Not yet, anyway.

I’d love to carry on this conversation with you and learn more about how you create content. If you’ve got any questions about using AI to help you create content in your business or you’d like to find out how I can help you create content for your business, get in touch and let’s chat more.