Last Friday morning I woke up to the news that Google Bard had just been released. It’s the long-awaited competition to ChatGPT that everyone’s been talking about in recent months.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm since late 2022 with its revolutionary ability to do things like conduct comprehensive research on different topics through to writing a whole month’s worth of social media posts in under a few minutes.

Both Bard and ChatGPT are artificial intelligence (AI) language models designed to produce human-like text and converse with people to assist with a wide variety of tasks.

I asked Google Bard to write me an 800 word blog post about how large language models (LLMs) like Bard and ChatGPT can accelerate and improve your marketing. The article it produced for me was good — in fact, very good! I could have posted its content here as a new blog post, sent it out as a newsletter and moved onto the next task on my to-do list. 

But that’s exactly the catch. 

In this new era of generative AI (meaning LLMs that have been specifically designed to help generate text-based content), producing new content is easy. Anyone can do it. Simply give your LLM clear instructions and you can have a blog, presentation, social media post, or essay whipped up in seconds — to a high standard. You can even ask it to add humour, make it more ‘Australian’ (or any other culture) or translate it into a different language.

With the advent of generative AI, there’s no excuse any more as a business owner for not writing blog posts (to increase your SEO — search engine optimisation) or posting on social media. With these tools at your disposal, creating content is super easy.

But in this new world of oversaturated volumes of content, people don’t want to read generic stuff anymore. They want highly specific information relevant to their specific interests, needs and desires. 

They want to hear your opinion, your critical thought and your unique voice. 

And that’s the part that AI can’t do for you.

  Yes, AI can help you with idea generation.

  Yes, AI can help you research your topics quickly and easily and it can curate thoughts and ideas into spectacularly well-thought-out articles.

  Yes, AI can help you write your content quickly and efficiently and drastically cut down the amount of time it takes you to produced content.

   Yes, AI can help you edit your content for grammar, spelling and clarity.

  Yes, AI can help you optimise your content for search engines by tell you the right keywords and phrases to use (this part is gold!). It can help you improve your content’s ranking in search results which can drive more traffic to your website or blog.

And yes, I used AI to generate the above list of yes items (ha!).

In fact, Google Bard tells me that AI “is a powerful tool for accelerating your marketing content creation. By automating tedious tasks and providing assistance with idea generation, research, writing, editing and optimisation, AI can help you produce higher quality content more quickly and efficiently.”

And yes, that’s true.

But Google Bard also tells me that AI is not a replacement for human creativity and judgment. It cannot:

   Create original ideas: AI can help you generate ideas based on existing data, but it cannot come up with truly original concepts.

  Understand the nuances of human language: AI can understand the literal meaning of words, but it cannot understand the nuances of human language, such as sarcasm and emotion.

  Write with a human voice: AI can generate text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate, but it cannot write with a human voice that is engaging and persuasive.

  Understand the needs of your audience: AI can analyze data about your audience, but it cannot understand their needs and desires in the same way that a human can.

  Be creative: AI can generate new ideas, but it cannot be creative in the same way that a human can. AI cannot come up with new concepts or ideas out of thin air. It can only generate new ideas based on existing data.

And so my suggestions on this are:

• Use AI to help you overcome the ‘blank page syndrome’ that results in procrastination and inaction.
• Use AI to help you generate draft content quickly and easily.
• Use AI to share great content, regularly and consistently.
• Infuse your content with your unique brand voice, with your creative thought and originality, your critical thought and your opinions.

And I hope I’ve managed to do a good job of that with this article as an example.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Drop me a comment in the comments section below if you agree/disagree with any of the above. This is a whole new conversation and I’m happy to be having it with you!

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In service to your success,

Kate

KATE DE JONG, PhD
INSPIRED BUSINESS
[email protected]
+61 424 176 658
katedejong.com