Marketing in the Age of AI

They say if you put an infinite number of monkeys in a room with infinite typewriters, they will eventually replicate the greatest literature of our times, but when it comes to AI are these the best of times or are they the blurst of times?

Since the rise of ChatGPT over the last year I’ve noticed that the majority of my LinkedIn feed seems to feature ChatGPT or AI in some aspect, whether its people talking about the possibilities of AI, people concerned about the rise of AI and humanity reaching a singularity event (if your name is Sarah Conner, I’d start to get concerned) or my personal favourite, the AI influencers. Typically, people who have just moved on from being the leading experts in NFT, moving on to the next clickbait thing they can find to organically grow their reach.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the future implications that AI has in day-to-day tasks, I even use Grammarly to help with writing blog posts. There are so many useful ways that AI can be used as a tool to increase productivity, from automating schedules to helping decide what to cook for tea. A friend of mine regularly enters a list of random ingredients from her fridge and asks ChatGPT to create a recipe for her from it. Most of the time it works out pretty well.

With this rise in AI, while some people are using it to optimise their days, others take it to a new level, using ChatGPT to create content for them. I’ve seen people plugging in a basic prompt for a social media post and then using the response to build their brands on social media. There are even instances of people taking this to the next level, using ChatGPT to create entire blog posts, website copy, or landing pages for their website.

The issue here is that, while ChatGPT is trained by humans, it isn’t trained in search engine optimization, keyword placement, CTA’s, etc. It means that, while it’s great for churning out a steady stream of content, that content isn’t working how you want it to. It also takes out the entire human aspect of writing, AI can’t convey the emotion or feeling behind a prompt, and at the end of the day, people buy from people.

Statistics indicate that millions of articles are now being created monthly with the help of AI systems. While the quantity of AI-generated content is impressive, the question arises: what about quality and user engagement? Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that websites employing AI-generated content can achieve comparable or even higher retention rates than those publishing human-written articles.

There are even websites that exist purely as content farms, typically these clickbait articles were created by people, but now it can be largely done by AI. The more people that view the clickbait AI articles the more traffic they get, and the more traffic the more ad revenue they get. This is something that Google has claimed they are cracking down on but, MIT Technology Review looked at almost 400 individual ads from over 140 major brands that NewsGuard identified on AI-generated sites, where the cost of a programmatic ad was $1.21 per thousand impressions. Brands are not reviewing their ads and AI content farms are raking in the profits.

But how can you tell the difference between AI and human content? Unlike the infinite number of monkeys on a typewriter, AI is trained in human speech patterns, meaning that you won’t need an infinite number until AI bots start churning out Shakespeare, soon enough it could be impossible to tell the difference. But you can test yourself on it today, one paragraph of this article was generated via ChatGPT. Can you tell which?

Daryl is experienced in broadcast media as a Social Media Strategist, he excels in leveraging digital platforms to enhance brand visibility. With digital marketing and customer service expertise, Daryl now serves as the Marketing and Insights Manager at Orbition Group, overseeing strategic decision-making based on data-driven insights Read more.