If you haven’t heard of ChatGPT yet, then strap in, because it’s quite exciting!
ChatGPT is an AI (artificial intelligence)-powered tool that can understand and respond to human language. It works by analyzing vast amounts of text data to learn patterns and relationships in language, allowing it to generate responses that are similar to what a human might say. Essentially, ChatGPT is a computer program that can communicate with humans in a way that feels natural and conversational, making it a useful tool for a wide range of applications, from customer service and support to content creation and market research.
And ChatGPT wrote that explanation itself. I asked it to explain what it was to someone who didn’t understand AI.
I have used ChatGPT for two main purposes in my business, and I wanted to tell you about them because I think you can benefit from it too.
Generating content
ChatGPT can write you a blog post. If you say “write me a blog post about the relationship between lemon and thyme”, it will write it for you. By the way, I actually did that and the post was pretty darn good (from the perspective of a non-chef anyway).
It can write you blog posts, introduction emails, referral emails, marketing spiels, summaries of content, replies to standard requests, training workshops, social media posts, and podcast episodes. It can do all of that. It can even produce images and videos if you want.
Now this is where we have to put the brakes on for a second and talk about how NOT to use ChatGPT. Just because you CAN get it to write a whole blog post for you and you can save hours of time, doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it. There are a couple of reasons why: authentic voice and accuracy.
Part of social media and sharing content is about connecting. If you haven’t written the content, it can be obvious to your readers. If they know you, they will pick up on it. And if they don’t know you, they still might find they aren’t engaged with the content as it can lack a certain something that shows it comes from a human.
So when I use it, I get it to write me an outline, or I get it to suggest some topics for a blog post, rather than the whole thing. For this article, I asked it “how can we use AI in our businesses but not sacrifice our own authentic voice?”. I didn’t use what it wrote, but it got me started asking other questions and eventually I had a structure for the post in my head.
Second thing to be careful about: Accuracy. ChatGPT can get stuff wrong. It hasn’t learned about everything from every time just yet. And it’s a new technology – what it’s being taught hasn’t been refined. Apparently it has a bit of a “left leaning” value set, too. Which is fine by me as I happily dance around on the left myself, but for others this could be an issue (I asked it if drag queens should be allowed to read to children and it said, in many more words than this – yes, they should. Which made me happy of course, but some could disagree and say it was “inaccurate information”).
Another awesome thing that it helps me with is getting started. Being neuro-diverse, I struggle with task initiation. Having this tool means I can sit down and in an hour, generate dozens of ideas for blog posts, and put the outlines into draft format. When it’s time to post something, I don’t have to “start”, I just have to “tweak”, which gets around my ADHD quite nicely.
Re-purposing content
As you probably already know, if you have a blog post, you have content you can re-use. You can turn it into small social media posts. You can make a Reel, a TikTok or a FB post. You can do a podcast, or an info-graphic. You can turn one piece of content into potentially dozens.
This is another use of ChatGPT. You can show it your blog post (that you wrote with your authentic voice, at least a majority of it anyway!) and ask it to turn it into a series of Instagram posts. You can show it your podcast episode transcript and ask it to use it to write a few tweets, or turn it into a blog post. You can show it your workshop content and ask it to write up an outline to advertise it. You name it, it can re-purpose it.
These are just the two ways that I use it, but if you ask ChatGPT itself, I’m sure it will tell you many more ways you can use it.
Just don’t forget:
- Make sure you add your voice and don’t post stuff as it’s generated. In our industry, authenticity is very important and your followers and clients will notice if it’s not your usual style or tone
- Put in place lots of human checks for errors and inaccuracies (as it does get stuff wrong!)
- Professional copywriters and SEO experts aren’t to be forgotten about – they still write way better than AI does for that kind of stuff.
So go and have a play – and enjoy!