Opinion piece: Is ChatGPT the key to creative success in the digital era?

ChatGPT may just be a chatbot, but its use extends far beyond conversation management alone. Here’s how ChatGPT can help you simplify and speed up processes:

Content brainstorming

If content is an important part of your marketing strategy, it can be a challenge to continuously come up with new and innovative ideas. In moments like these, an AI tool like ChatGPT can help you out.

For example, ChatGPT could give you a list of article ideas that might fit into your content strategy.

A car manufacturer may ask:

"Give me 20 ideas for articles about the future of the automotive industry."

Not all ideas will be equally as strong, but that’s not a bad thing. The goal is to filter ChatGPT’s longlist for relevant items and start from there.

Generating first drafts

As ChatGPT remembers what was previously said in your ‘conversation’, you can go even further than simply asking for a list of content ideas.

You could ask the tool to write a first draft for one of the article ideas. Or let ChatGPT generate press releases, captions for social media and emails within just a few seconds.

Still, copywriters won’t be missed anytime soon. While ChatGPT can write text in no time, the content is not always correct. Besides, AI can’t yet reach the level of creativity and writing style of a human writer.

Writing titles and meta tags

ChatGPT can be a great resource for SEO as well.

When you’ve written a first – or second, or third – draft, ChatGPT can write SEO meta tags for your article.

A prompt like this one will give you possible titles, meta descriptions and SEO keywords for your article in the blink of an eye:

Write 5 SEO meta tags for this article:
[text article]

Again, not all answers will be a good fit. The human eye can separate the wheat from the chaff and select all relevant items that ChatGPT suggests.

Turning complex ideas into simple concepts

Imagine your organisation being active in quantum mechanics. You’re used to working with physics theory, but now you need content for your website that explains quantum mechanics in an understandable way.

You don’t know what assumptions you can make about your target audience – what they do or don’t know, what ideas they’re able to get without needing higher education.

A good starting point for a text like this one is ChatGPT’s answer to the following prompt:

"Explain quantum mechanics to a high school student."

Editing or rewriting content in a specific style

For now, the creativity of ChatGPT’s texts isn’t that impressive yet. However, the tool can help any writer to make content more readable, compact, (in)formal or converting.

Whether we’re talking about a cold email, an invitation for an event or a press release: ChatGPT keeps your texts clear, to the point and effective.

ChatGPT may be revolutionary to the day-to-day life of content experts, but it still experiences growing pains – with some notable consequences. While the tool creates many opportunities, it’s wise for users to keep its limitations in mind.

One of those limitations is the fact that ChatGPT was only trained until 2021. This means questions about recent events can’t be answered by the tool.

Furthermore, answers to questions are not reviewed by people. So, ChatGPT may create content that seems acceptable, but that is actually meaningless or not entirely correct.

The ethical question is another thing to be aware of. Those with bad intentions could easily use ChatGPT to generate fake news or spam, or to pretend they’re someone else.

The most successful companies and teams won’t develop their own AI tools by tomorrow, but they’ll think of the most efficient ways to use existing tools like ChatGPT.

In the same way, teams didn’t build their own search engine machine in 1998, but throughout the years, they explored different ways to use Google and get interesting insights. So, first and foremost, ChatGPT will be a tool that organisations can use to reach their goals.

That’s why robots probably won’t steal the jobs of content experts in the near future. More likely, the job description of those experts will go from “using human power and creativity to create content” to “working efficiently with tools like ChatGPT to create content”.

The difference with how it used to be isn’t even that big – we’ve been using online spell checkers and translating tools since the nineties. AI tools are a sensible next step.

However, we don’t know what the future of the creative industry will bring and how the role of tools like ChatGPT will evolve. What we do know is that big changes are coming. Those who can’t adapt to these new technologies, may find it hard to stay relevant in the digital era.