ChatGPT vs. Copywriter

AI is an innovation that is spinning the marketing world on its head. In many ways, AI can make our jobs as marketers easier, but is spitting out content at the snap of your fingers one of them? Not really. Yes, generative AI tools, like ChatGPT can write up a blog post in a matter of seconds, but churning out content this way isn’t going to be doing your web traffic any favors. ChatGPT is great for giving you a cursory overview of complex topics, or even creating an outline for your blog post, but relying on generative AI tool for all of your content creation is going to bite you in the ass, here’s why:

What Generative AI Tools Can’t Do: Rank As High on Google

If there is just one reason not to use ChatGPT to write your web content, let this be it. While generative AI tools can write you a piece of content quickly, they lack the expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (a.k.a. E.E.A.T) to rank on SERPs. Every so often, Google updates its algorithm, leaving marketers scrambling to figure out how to keep their sites top of mind for potential customers. While the exact formula is a secret sauce, Google does clue us in on some of the top benchmarks for ranking.

Google continually announces in its updates that in search results, it prioritizes content that is useful to the user and deprioritizes low-quality content. While generative AI tools can compile a lot of information fast, these platforms generate unoriginal content that is a collection of information from various sources on the internet. Because this information is essentially crowdsourced, it does not capture the expertise you need for a first-page ranking. The bottom line is that using AI might allow you to generate more content quickly, but if none of it ranks, it doesn’t really matter.

What Generative AI Tools Can’t Do: The Human Element

AI-generated content doesn’t resonate the same with customers as human-created content, no matter how thoroughly you prompt the chatbot. A great copywriter will tap into what motivates your customers to engage with your service or product, which they can do because they are deeply familiar with the human experience. Generative AI tools, on the other hand, are only familiar with a lot of data on how others have described it without the nuances conveyed by human emotion and an understanding of context and timeliness. A great copywriter will use tone, voice, and style to capture your brand and speak authentically to your customers.

Beyond style, one of the main weaknesses of generative AI tools is the inability to generate original content. It can only pull data from what is already out there. Meaning that if you use AI, you lose the original thought that true experts can provide. This is especially problematic if you are positioning your brand/staff as thought leaders.

What Generative AI Tools Can’t Do: Fact Check

We’ve heard from clients, who have dabbled with generative AI, that when prompted about their complex products, AI has created straight-up lies. We’ve already touched on the importance of expertise in an E.E.A.T. model. By nature, generative AI tools cannot produce original expertise, they only pull from published data, so don’t have access to cutting-edge ideas or knowledge that are embedded in people with deep experience.

These tools also don’t have the ability to fact check, a crucial component of publishing. The expertise component of ranking on Google’s search engine prioritizes cold, hard facts and links out to high-authority, relevant sources. Generative AI tools cannot reliably cite their sources, and when they does, sometimes they make them up, a phenomenon researchers are calling AI hallucinations. Made-up facts and pretend sources wouldn’t fly when being delivered from a real-life expert, so Google won’t reward this either.

What Generative AI Tools Can Do

At The Marketing Dept., we don’t discredit generative AI tools completely, but we’re thoughtful about how we use them. ChatGPT can be useful for tasks such as keyword research, analyzing data sets, idea generation, and reviewing for grammatical mistakes, but you’ll never see a generative AI tool produce an article with more expertise than one of our clients.