It’s January 2023 when I’m writing this and AI (artificial intelligence) seems to be the topic of discussion; at least it is in the marketing world.
AI isn’t new, but the advancements lately seem pretty incredible to my simple mind. The thing is, they are just barely getting started.
The big thing AI is being used for in marketing is to produce content. We’ve been using Jarvis/Jasper AI for some time to create simple content for things like Google Business Profile service descriptions. It does a pretty good job of writing short-form copy for things such as this.
In the last month or so, another AI called ChatGPT has entered the scene.
ChatGPT has blown me away with its capabilities.
The way ChatGPT works from a user experience standpoint is that you have a conversation with it. You “chat” with the AI to tell it what you want. Every time it gives an answer or produces content, it remembers the entire discussion.
An Example Of How I Used ChatGPT
Here is an example of how I used it, showing the conversation I had with it. I am not giving you the detailed responses it gave me as you don’t want to read the same content it gave me over and over with the edits it made. If you want to see that detail, go to chat.openai.com and get a free account. Note it is only free while in beta. They will be charging for it soon and I suspect it will be quite expensive.
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Write a 500-word blog post on Powerstroke diesel injector problems.
It wrote a very good blog post about Powerstroke injector problems. The information is fairly basic if you are a seasoned technician, but from a consumer standpoint, it tells you what you need to know.
Add a couple of minor grammatical errors
I did this because I wanted it to look more like a human wrote it. But I’m no English major, and i said “minor grammatical errors” when I ave the instructions, so I couldn’t find them. So I asked the AI:
What were the grammatical errors that you added?
It showed me the exact errors it added and explained the reason they were grammatically incorrect.
SEO optimize this for the term “powerstroke injector replacement”
It added the term “powerstroke injector replacement” a few times throughout the blog. It had that same icky feeling like when you’re reading something that a person stuffed some keywords into an article where they didn’t really belong, but it wasn’t too bad. Sometimes it’s a necessity of SEO.
Give me a few titles to choose from
It gave me 8 titles to choose from. They were all very good titles.
Give me a couple of meta descriptions to choose from.
It gave me 5 meta descriptions to choose from. They were pretty good, but they were too long. Google limits meta descriptions to 155 characters. The ones it gave me were 250-ish characters in length. It obviously knew what a meta description was, but I was disappointed that it didn’t know the best practice of staying under 155 characters.
Keep them under 155 characters
It gave me 5 new meta descriptions under 155 characters.
Write 3 social media posts to promote this blog
It gave me 3 pretty good social media posts and it gave me relevant hashtags for each.
Write a 5 minute video script to accompany this blog
It wrote a video script and even told me the visual scenes to create throughout the video. It was relevant to the blog and had the feel of a quality YouTube video.
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My Thoughts
I am very impressed with what I saw. I would be lying if I didn’t say that it concerns me. It’s not there yet, but just like robots have replaced humans on assembly lines, it would not surprise me if this one day becomes good enough to replace marketers. In fact, I would say AI is the biggest existing threat to the marketing industry.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably an auto repair shop owner. I can also see this as a major disrupter in the automotive industry.
Understand that AI is not simply searching the internet and providing answers based on searches. The way I understand this to work is that AI is consuming the internet and gaining knowledge. It then uses that knowledge to formulate its output.
So think about this. The AI knows about common car problems. It will eventually gain access to repair manuals, wiring diagrams, how-to articles, and much more. We are all teaching it how to do what we do every time we create digital content about our profession.
ChatGPT (OpenAI) has an API you can pay to connect to.
Eventually, you will be able to connect AI to the datalink connector on a car and it will be able to lead someone through the diagnostic process.
It will never be able to replace the faulty part and it will never be able to crawl all over the car and pin out a wiring harness, but it will make your competition as good at diagnostics as any other shop – maybe.
The Weaknesses of AI and ChatGPT
Artificial intelligence does not have thought leadership – yet. Artificial intelligence does not interject opinions – yet. It also does not have your experiences.
At Shop Marketing Pros, we are constantly talking about how important it is to get people to know, like, and trust you.
It could be tempting to go to ChatGPT and start spinning up a bunch of web and social media content. The problem is, that content doesn’t show off your knowledge. It doesn’t show off your personality. It doesn’t make you a thought leader.
The biggest reason you would use ChatGPT right now is for SEO (search engine optimization). Content is king when it comes to SEO. The problem is, AI just devalued the heck out of content.
Any idiot can now build a website and fill it up with factually correct content.
So how are the search engines going to continue to provide the most high-quality search results? Because let’s face it – AI-generated content is just a regurgitation of what’s already on the web. People are looking for thought leadership, not the same old thing stated in a new way.
In Conclusion
AI has come a long way and continues to get better. There are a lot of places where it will improve efficiencies and accuracy, and I’m talking way beyond marketing and auto repair.
The conspiracy theorist in me agrees with a friend of mine who recently said “I’ve seen a lot of movies that started out with ‘You should see this new AI. It’s doing amazing things!’. None of those movies ended well”
