Using AI for Professional Content Creation

Post-covid Leadership

Fiona Passantino, late April 2023

Leaders today need to be visible. Not just physically present for their teams but digitally, producing posts and thought leadership content for internal and external audiences. When words are needed, ChatGPT can help. Refine for accuracy, voice and coherence, it’s a tool that can help raise your profile and get your message out. Five ways to use it and five best practices to make it your own.

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Behind every successful leader will soon be an open ChatGPT browser tab. This is the bot that has creative writers, content creators and marketing professionals all over the world pulling out their hair. We see the future of digital therapists, bosses and significant others.

But in the end, it’s just tech. It’s a shiny new object with some powerful capabilities and equally impressive weaknesses that is not magical. It can be used for particular types of content generation for those times when we need copy for specific purposes.

It is also, often, just plain wrong.

Leaders today need to be visible. Not just physically present for their teams, at work, attending meetings and addressing stakeholders, but producing meaningful thought leadership content for internal and external audiences when they go home at night. Understanding how ChatGPT can help, refined for accuracy, voice and coherence, can raise your profile and get your message out.

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What’s ChatGPT and where did it come from?

ChatGPT is short for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer” and it’s the new artificial intelligence language model of the moment. It was developed by OpenAI, a research organization founded in 2015 by a group of smart, rich people, such as Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others. The organization’s mission is to create and promote AI technology to benefit humanity.

Right.

Since then, it’s had a frankly terrifying exponential uptake among normal people, having reached 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history[i].

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How does it work?

The application starts by processing the commands you enter and structuring its response around the patterns it recognizes. The input is “tokenized” (transformed into numerical representation, or lots of little 0s and 1s). Then, thanks to probability and a dataset of over 45 terabytes of material from websites, books, and other online sources, generates a set of likely responses. These are ranked by probability of being correct, and the top-ranked response is what is spit back.

How the response is created is extremely complex. The more complicated the input, the harder it is to trace the probability tree used to feed its ranking or choose its output. This is what we call a “black box” neuro network. A fancy way of saying that even the smart people who invented it don’t fully understand how it works.

Which should be fine.

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What do I use it for?

For us, for now, we will use ChatGPT to generate headlines, product descriptions, marketing materials, training content, social media posts, thought leadership articles, reels, job applications and school essays… anything that requires the words-words-words that are the “filler” around the ideas that you have come up with – hopefully – all by yourself.

This allows you to free yourself from the words-words-words part and simply focus on the more fun, complex and strategic creative thinking you prefer to do anyway. ChatGPT is not there to replace human creativity, but a tool to augment and enhance it. To ignite the fires for an idea, flesh out a concept or give you the raw bones of an article to start with.

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A few concrete use cases:

1. Generating ideas: No idea what to write about? Enter a topic or a keyword and out comes a list of concepts for articles, blog posts or social media content. This even works for meal ideas when entertaining your vegan-keto-no-sugar friend (and includes a shopping list), or what to write to a colleague who’s having a bad day.

2. Writing articles and blog posts: Once you have an idea, enter a topic and a set of parameters, such as the target audience, tone, and style, length and language and it will generate a text that meets these requirements. Such as, “write 200 words on the risks of investing in Bit Coin.”

3. Editing and proofreading: This is great for non-native speakers; when writing in a language not fully your own, dump it in and allow your algorithmic friend to edit and proofread content, identify errors and suggest improvements to grammar, syntax, and style.

4. Generating headlines, names and titles; if you can’t think of what name to give your new project, company, essay or kitten, ChatGPT can help with a variety of ideas to get you started.

5. Full-on translation: if you need a certain chunk of text re-written in another language, style, format (turn prose into poetry for instance) or tone of voice, ChatGPT has an edge over Google Translate.

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OK. Let’s do this!

Take a deep breath, we are doing this. First of all, you will need to create an account and log in. Go to Google and find OpenAI, the company that started ChatGPT, and sign up. You open an account just like you would as a first time Uber Eats customer. Login with a 2-step verification process and wait a few hours to be approved; it’s free and in a research phase for now.

Once you get in, you will have to promise to “only use ChatGPT for good”. So, no spamming, hacking, building bombs or generating the next Covid virus. Find a dark grey box at the bottom. That’s where you enter in your prompt, the command you enter the system. It works top to bottom, with the old prompts at the top.

Hit the little “send” button, and it will start generating within seconds; fully original text that no one else has ever seen before. If you’re on the wrong track, hit “stop generating” and start over. Or, refine your original input and “send” again.

That’s it; you’re on your way.

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Making ChatGPT your own

Be aware of the strengths and limitations; here are five ways to prompt like a pro.

1. Provide clear and specific parameters. This will help the model generate more accurate and relevant responses. Prompts can be as long as the actual essay you wish to generate.

2. Refine and revise. Use your own judgement and editing skills to ensure the text is readable. The model does better with straight explainer pieces rather than opinion. It uses about twice the number of words it needs to make its point. Humor is generally flat and full of clichés, and “friendly” returns text that is eye-rollingly condescending.

3. Results may be just plain wrong. When you see that grey warning box on the home page stating: “may occasionally generate incorrect information”, this is not a joke. Since 80% of the internet is garbage, and the food this creature feeds off is the internet, you can assume that the majority of the facts it comes back with will be questionable too. Old-fashioned manual research is needed for every single statistic you see, and likely none of the references will lead to any verifiable information or live articles.

4. include the number of words for the final result. If you say “write a 200-word landing page for a real estate website”, it will execute. If you don’t specify, it will just generate the number of words it thinks it needs to get the job done. Which is usually too many.

5. Avoid biased or sensitive content. ChatGPT is fed with an internet full of opinion and human slant, racism, discrimination or plain old meanness. Carefully consider your prompt wording and avoid language or topics that could be interpreted as offensive or signal a descent into a rabbit hole.

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Stop generating

Using ChatGPT well requires a balance of managed expectations, technical skill, creativity, practice and planning, and by using it in a strategic and thoughtful way.

Here’s what it’s good for – getting started. We all know the “blank page” syndrome we creatives have to deal with every single day, when we sit with a slack jaw and an empty stare in front of a blank screen. This is a tool to get our motors humming. Re-writing an existing text is far easier than coming up with something from scratch.

So, stop generating. Start your new life as a GPT-powered creative.

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No time to read? There’s a video for that.

Making GPT Work for You

Leaders today need to be highly visible. Physically, with teams and stakeholders but more and more, also digitally, producing meaningful posts and thought leadership content for internal and external audiences. When words are needed, ChatGPT can help. When refined for accuracy, voice and coherence, it’s a tool that can help raise your profile and get your message out. AI is intimidating. Here are a few facts you need to know. Five easy ways to use it and five best practices to make AI your b*tch.

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[i] Hu (2023) “ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note” Reuters. Accessed April 26, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/

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