How to use Chat GPT to create content for your business

The question isn’t should I use AI, it’s how should I use it. When it comes to creating content, leveraging Artificial Intelligence will save you time and money. But if you expect Chat GPT to create informative and engaging blog posts, website copy, mission statements, profiles, social media captions, brand stories, product descriptions, newsletters, sales emails or any other marketing collateral for your business, think again. Knowing how to supply the right inputs to a generative AI platform is key to producing usable outcomes.

If you’ve ever messaged your partner about how you decided to sleep with someone instead of speak with them, WhatsApped a friend to tell them you killed your date instead of kissed them, or complimented a colleague on their nipples instead of their dimples, then you’ve already been interacting with AI! Luckily, technology has come a long way since predictive text started landing us in trouble. But just like correcting the typos in text messages, it still takes a little work to get AI working for you.

Here's some tips for creating content using Chat GPT for your business:

1. Break it down

Chat GPT is great at spitting out generic explanations in verbose language when you ask broad questions. Stuff that sounds ok on the surface but lacks substance and personality if you have a discerning reader. And let’s assume that whoever is reading your copy is discerning, because they’re sizing up whether or not to buy what you’re selling. So, to cut down on soulless, empty waffle and get to the point when it comes to conveying information about your product or service, you need to break down the writing task into smaller chunks.

For example, if you want to send a newsletter to your database about your new kids costume line, don’t ask Chat GPT to “write a marketing email about why you need a handmade Bluey costume”; prompt it with a series of questions that address different aspects of the product and proposition that you can combine to craft a unique message, like…

“Why do parents dread Book Week?”

“Why do kids love Bluey?”

“Tell me about Bluey costume fails”

“Why is Bluey a better role model than Harry Potter, Gangsta Granny, Dr Suess, or Cinderella?”

“Describe what Bluey looks like”

“Is dressing up as Bluey for Halloween over?”

“Tell me all the things I can do with my time if I outsource making of a Bluey costume”

…etc

Stitch all that info together and you’ll have a value proposition to pitch, a product description to embellish, all while having thwarted any barriers to sale. Ask Chat GPT to write an intro and salutation and you can then put the finished copy through Grammarly to finesse it when you’re done. Wackadoo.

Use a series of prompts that address the subject from multiple angles.

2. Be specific

The information that Chat GPT draws on to respond to your prompts is only as good as the library of information that it can access. This isn’t a problem of scarcity – there’s a universe of content that it can connect to! The challenge is in phrasing your query so that Chat GPT not only gets the right book off the shelf, but also turns to the right page.

Open AI powers Chat GPT with access to various algorithmic models that have scraped the sum total of publicly available information on the internet, as well as digesting data supplied by users, third party partners and human trainers. In fact, Chat GPT has crunched through so much text, imagery and audio that artificial intelligence has been used to generate more data on which AI models can train to refine their understanding of language patterns, ability to assign meaning, and predict human-like responses. In other words, it’s pretty damn clever and capable of nuanced responses depending on the words you select to create your prompt.

For example, if you ask Chat GPT “what are the benefits of plant protein?”, the answer is different to the response you get when you type “why should I take plant protein?”. It’s a subtle change, but knowing exactly what you want to say to your prospective customer when you’re spouting off about the advantages of your new hemp health bars will make a difference between coming up with marketing jargon that doesn’t speak to your audience or useful information that someone can apply to their lives in order to weigh up whether or not to make a purchase.

Refine your prompts for a more personalised response.

3. Check your sources

Chat GPT trained at the university of machine learning, where it used performance enhancing drugs like:

• Unsupervised and Unsupervised Learning - pre-training with vast amounts of labelled and unlabelled data to establish an understanding of language and how meaning is ascribed.

• Transformer Architecture - a tool that simplifies and speeds up how the neural network – or the brains of the operation – processes information and makes calculations, by reading every source simultaneously to figure out what information is most relevant and where attention should be focused.

• Data Tokens - text, images and sound broken down into chunks so the neural network can set parameters and variables (billions of them) to then weigh up how much value to give them based on your prompt.

• Reinforcement Learning Based on Human Feedback - what it sounds like plus some techy stuff.

It’s a genius with an addiction problem. It needs us. We built its brain, furnished it with rules and processes, then filled it with content. And it continues to rely on the ingenuity and initiative of humans to guide its evolution. That’s not say it can’t be smarter than us – it can select sources, analyse data and calculate a response faster than we can - but it doesn’t have the impetus, drive and desire of sentient beings, it can only learn about those concepts. So don’t treat ChatGPT like the oracle and take it’s word, or words, as gospel. You always need to be in charge.

Go through the content it regurgitates with a fine tooth comb to make sure what it says is true and in a tone that fits your brand. AI is not a dictionary or encyclopaedia; it’s a complex extrapolation tool that draws on information it has been fed to draw conclusions. So it’s possible to perpetuate inaccuracies and bias in your own content if questionable or incorrect data has been supplied to the system.

Edit, fact check, and finesse.

4. Insert yourself

If every business uses Chat GPT to create copy instead of their brains, you can imagine the glossy and professional sounding yet homogenous and uninspiring results. Audiences are not stupid, and will vote with their feet if a brand is not connecting with them and the set of problems they’re trying to solve by considering your product or service as a possible solution.

So it’s critical, before you embark on using ChatGPT to streamline your content concerns, that you know the personality and particular selling points of your brand. It’s true that Chat GPT is being trained to generate text in different tones. But you need to know the tone of voice that best reflects your brand in the first place, and make sure it sounds consistent across the rest of your marking collateral, social media and other customer touchpoints.

AI cannot provide creativity, context, judgement or emotional intelligence in a vacuum. Nor can it draw on authentic experiences that you convert into persuasive storytelling. These are the inputs and inflections that you need to provide. By all means, write up your information and anecdotes, then run them through AI for wordsmithing. But the authenticity and authority that need to be conveyed in your communications with potential customers in order for them to trust you, can only be injected by you.

Know who you are and do the brand work first.

Now, all that’s left to do is to ask Siri to search Spotify for a playlist to ride off into the sunset to.

AI was not used in the making of this blog post!