Do you guys use AI to write content? Why does it cost so much to write a blog if you can just use AI? Can we just use AI to rip off and remix all the content our competitors are making? What AI tools do you use to write marketing content? Why does ChatGPT suck now at writing blogs?* Etc etc etc you get it. Well, here’s the answer :)
Despite these questions being clearly “of the time” (AKA 2024), the answers are constantly changing before our eyes, thus betraying a deep misunderstanding of how these tools work and what they are good for. There’s a huge mismatch of expectations here.
The overhyped intern
Think of AI as that overly enthusiastic intern who’s always buzzing around but needs a bit of hand-holding. Sure, they’ve got potential, but they’re not exactly cranking out Pulitzer Prize-winning prose on their own. The same goes for AI tools. They’re fast, they’re eager, but they lack that special touch — you know, taste, insight, creativity. That’s where you come in.
This is the marketer’s version of ‘sell the news’ —like word processing and spell check before, AI is now already priced into writing good content. The advantages in running inbound, providing value to leads, ranking in search engines (and AI tools) is gone. On their own, by definition, AI tools generate at the mean.
But! Don’t despair, if AI can let you write a high quality 1000 word blog post in half an hour instead of 2-3 hours, that’s still incredibly valuable. It just can’t do it instantly.
Like an intern or junior staff writer, AI models have lots of enthusiasm. They can produce. They just can’t edit or bring novel ideas that anyone will actually care to read. Like I said, AI doesn’t have taste. You still have to bring that. Luckily, for a senior marketer or editor, managing an AI tool is just like managing a junior or staff writer.
Here are our pro-tips for h2 2024 on managing AI:
Use a professor’s drafting process
The most basic error is to attempt to generate content of any quality in a single prompt 👎 for example:
Yawn. This prompt will produce the most boring inane useless output. A blurred average of every vanilla blog post that’s come before.
Remember instead when your undergrad professors would require you to approve your paper topic? Yeah, so instead try something like this 👍:
Know what comes next? You! You have to bring taste and insight! Choose a topic that you know something about. It should be useful, it should be interesting, and it should definitely be a topic that you have something to say about.
Like an intern, break a task like writing a piece of content into several steps. Approve the topic. Then ask for an outline. Mark the outline up and give it back to the writer. Get those steps down? Great, now let’s switch it up and give you a promotion. You’re not an intern, you’re an executive! As such, you will find you may have to provide the outline, because you (the executive) who works in the industry, will know better what the actual subsections of that topic are. So what does the amazing smart intelligent executive do? They give their outline back to the intern (AKA ChatGPT). This might look like:
When the idea, insight, and outline are right, then ask them to generate the actual content. Imagine how an editor would have several conversations about a piece with their writer before the writer spends the day on it. Then when you get the draft back, give them notes and ask them to revise.
Use voice notes and other examples of your own wording
Here’s a tip I’m fond of: after getting an outline for a piece of content, I will record a voice note on the topic, covering the key things someone needs to know about each point on the outline. I’ll even include jokes and metaphors. Why? Because AI is like that one friend who’s a trivia whiz but can’t tell a joke to save their life. You want it to sound like you, not like the typical AI tone that errs on the side of a professional robot.
I’ll then transcribe this. There are unlimited ways to do this. You could speak directly to ChatGPT’s apps, or I prefer to pace around the block with my AirPods and then send myself a voice memo which I transcribe with a Whisper app on my Mac. In any case, here’s how it looks:
So I chose the topic from a list, I edited the outline, and I spent 5 minutes explaining the key points to capture—this is my blog, but my digital intern is going to write it up for me.
Play to its strengths
There are a number of things AI is much better at than a human! Writing a blog is not yet one of them though as we tend to conflate speed with quality (we should stop doing that). AI is *fast* at writing content, not good at it. So the key is teamwork. A fast drafter, even a junior one, is still an asset to the team.
One area I find AI to be very weak is in the introduction and closing of pieces. If I’m drafting long form content with ChatGPT, I find the results are much better if I write the introductory paragraph. There’s just so much human to inject in there, not to mention it’s the slim opportunity to capture a reader.
AI can, in spite of itself, be very clever. Since it can instantly reference all of the English language, it can identify puns and other witticisms impossibly quick. It’s just terrible at deploying them, they come out saccharine and sanitized. So instead try something like this:
Other tools?
I’m out on any marketing specific content generator. The moment has passed. The best way to interact with these models is definitely in their native interfaces, in chat, instead of wrapped in somebody else’s tech. I need to be able to coach and manage the model like a human writer, so the Saas UI is useless to me. Now! I definitely encourage you to experiment with all the frontier models, particularly the latest from Anthropic.
In summary: Right now, AI does not have the taste or insight to make anything on its own that is meaningful to your customers or to your marketing funnel. Remember, they have AI to answer their questions too :) You need to see these tools as a support staff, as a personal assistant that can quickly get your senior level insight to a digestible format. The above is my workflow, but if you work against this principle and expectation you’ll have success. At least until ChatGPT 5.0.
