Episode #357: Will My Content Marketing Be Swamped By ChatGPT?

Content marketing has been around for many years now and is an accepted way of appealing to clients. Thought Leadership and Intellectual Property are given away for free to establish our credentials with the buyers. If we show how knowledgeable we are, prospective clients will choose us over our rivals. So for many years now, blogs, books, podcasts, magazine and newspaper articles, videos, Medium articles, social media posts, white papers, surveys and numerous other tools have been at the vanguard to prove we are experts in our fields. This has required a lot of hard earned experience and an ability to communicate that experience to others. Then ChatGPT turns up and opens up a floodgate of content for people who are vying with us for the client’s attention.

ChatGPT is a vast curator of knowledge from the entire world and it is unbelievably fast at churning it out. How can one person compete with that? Our rivals can go to ChatGPT, then tweek the content and pass it off as their own efforts. Our clients probably cannot tell the difference. In a lot of cases, perception is everything. If the buyer sees you are pumping out vast quantities of content, they will conclude that you are an expert in this area, even though the chances are strong that they will never even read the content or not very much of it. ChatGPT can become the great equaliser between competing firms in the content marketing department.

This is real for me. I have 6 books published, 1779 Podcasts and 652 Video show episodes released, over 3000 articles on LinkedIn, etc. I am sure others will also have substantial resources released out into the wild to prove expertise in certain areas. What can we do about all of this?

The answer is differentiation. ChatGPT and other similar engines are good at collecting and synthesising information. At this point, it is generated in a quite recognisable style and tends toward the generic. ChatGPT so far, is not great at distinguishing the quality of the content. It also makes things up and lies, which the industry has cleverly marketed as “hallucinations”. I quite like “bald faced lies” as the preferred descriptor. How can you trust a machine which cannot differentiate between fake and real content and can only collect and collate it?

Because it is synthesising vast amounts of content, the style tends to be a bit utilitarian and dull. This is where we have an advantage still. We have examples, stories, happenings we have witnessed first-hand from our specific component of the industry and we can include these in our content. The specificity means it is hard for ChatGPT to collect the information as this is personal to us and we have never published it anywhere as yet, to be swept up and homogenised by the machine. There is also a gap between when we publish it and when ChatGPT can get its hands on it.

There is also our style. A competitor telling ChapGPT to write something in the style of Dr. Greg Story is certainly possible, but all they are doing is reinforcing my content and my expertise. Dr. Greg Story also has 100% control over his style and he can vary it as well with no qualms or permissions. I try to write my content such that someone reading it will recognise the style as mine. I write in a very informal style, often using slang and I quite like idioms and alliteration. These are not complete moats which will deny people from copying me, but how many people in my industry are going to try and reproduce me? You have to be interested in Japan, leadership, sales, communication, presentations and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. That is an incredibly small circle of rivals. For most of us in business, this will be the case - we will have relatively few rivals in the content marketing world in our specific area of expertise.

Even for famous authors and influencers, there have always been copycats and people trying to rip their stuff off and yet they are still going. For all of us, we see so many attempts to fool us with social media spewing out constant phishing attacks, deep fakes, etc., but we want the real McCoy. We get upset when we are fooled into buying something that is not what it is supposed to be. If we get a ChatGPT fake version of a favourite writer or thought leader’s content, are we going to be happy? Are we going to be satisfied with an avatar or a deep fake trying to pass itself off as someone we admire in an attempt to fool us?

If you cannot write and have a limited intellect or parsimonious business experience, then ChatGPT will certainly be of help. The problem is after people meet you, they find you cannot write and that you have limited intellect or parsimonious business experience. You get the meeting through subterfuge of clever repackaging, but the reality is still the reality. Either you have the real goods or you don’t. If you have them, then you don’t bother with ChatGPT fakery and trying to pass yourself off as something you are not.

Will ChatGPT and all of the other machines out there get much better? Of course they will, but for most of us in business, this won’t detract from the hope I have offered in this article. We can be more confident about what we are doing in content marketing, because what we are doing is the real thing, in real time.