As AI tools like ChatGPT become more widely available, business owners and marketers are increasingly turning to these tools to enhance their content creation and marketing efforts. But what does this mean for authenticity in marketing? Can we use these tools with integrity, or are they paving the way for a new era of inauthentic content creation?
As a former digital marketing consultant and current writer, I’m sharing my experiences with ChatGPT and offering insights on how to use this tool in a way that serves both your business and your clients. In this episode, we discuss…
• The ethical considerations of using AI in marketing
• The benefits and drawbacks of using these tools for content creation
• How to use ChatGPT in an ethical way
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or a business owner just starting out, this episode will challenge you to think more deeply about the role of AI in business and how you can use it in a way that enhances your creativity without sacrificing authenticity.
*Resources mentioned during the episode*
The Outsiders Business Academy – A self-paced course for you to work through in your own time, to learn – and implement – the foundations of building a profitable business that lets you escape the 9 to 5. onestepoutside.com/course
Using Chatgpt in your business
Hello, welcome back as we’re talking about a very hot topic today, which is artificial intelligence, AI, and specifically chat to GPT. So unless you’ve been living under a rock recently, I imagined someone would have told you about because it’s really word of mouth spreading this chat GPT. It’s an AI tool. I won’t even attempt to describe it, I think in a way, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a language model, really, as it always tells me when I asked it something difficult. So at the time of recording, it has a lot of knowledge up to I think it’s 2021 and the free version. And so it doesn’t know recent events. It’s, it’s, well, what can I say about limitations, but it’s, it’s a great tool, in fact, is what we want to look at today, how we can use it, yes, it’s a little bit scary.
The rise of the robots Terminator is coming. But and there are lots of there’s sort of a Wild West in terms of legalities, and so on. But you know, we talked about ethical marketing last week. And I think in that context is interesting to think about how we can use these tools ethically, and effectively, always. So we don’t want to just not use it necessarily. But rather, it’s the reality of what’s happening. And the world is changing at a fast pace as ever faster and faster, exponentially, so and so we want to stay on top of the skills we need to thrive. And ultimately, if we can make our lives easier, right? I always think about one of my first presentations I did at the seventh and seventh digital nomad conference in Barcelona. Some years ago, I did a little bit of sort of pop culture research, I suppose, into the history of work, and so on. And I was reminded of the fact that you know, ancient Greece, the ancient Romans, in fact, I’m sure the ancient Egyptians they saw work as like a pain, a torment. And they really valued leisure, and creativity, and art and philosophy and so on.
Now, the caveat is that they had slaves, and I think the parallel and forgive me for the comparison, and it was awful. And of course, thank goodness, that’s all gone. I think the parallel is that potentially, in an ethical way, let’s see when robots start to have souls. If that’s the case, then you know, they can do the repetitive grunt work and manual labor so that we can be freed up as human beings to be more creative, and philosophical, and so on, right. And that can only be a good thing. So I’m actually going to share some really concrete ways in which I’ve been using and this is really new, but actually have been enjoying using it. And the a couple of caveats, I suppose.
First, don’t let it become a procrastination. Don’t let it become a distraction, where you’re just kind of endlessly brainstorming staff and so on when you’re actually not using it, right.
So think of a specific usage for it, and then use it for that and then move on basically. And then secondly, it’s not 100% accurate, and a couple of areas that I’ve seen and heard so one is, somebody said that if Outlander podcast with Rory Sutherland, I think it was recently that if you ask it to share, you know, references like a bibliography kind of thing of articles talking about something and actually made them up. So they weren’t real articles. It sort of had a think, okay, it’s asking this person is asking for references. This is how it should be formatted and made up you know, Lindbergh, comma A brackets 2022. How to use chat GBT as a solopreneur, featured in The Wall Street Journal kind of thing. And maybe the newspaper doesn’t exist, maybe that article doesn’t exist, right? So that’s one watch out. And the second thing is legally, ethically, I wouldn’t use it to create completely original content, and then willy nilly just post that out there. Right?
I would really suggest and this is how I’m using it. They use it as a kind of raw brainstorming generation, or summary tool of your existing content.
And then of course, you’re going to use that as a basis and tweak it into your voice and make sure it’s accurate, and right for you and your brand, and so on. So if you think that the most basic, I find it really useful to summarize things, so for example, if I do a podcast interview, once a month, I interview somebody on reimagining success, how they’ve escaped the nine to five, I get, in fact, this is a bit meta. I get auto, which is an AI tool to transcribe the conversation, then I can copy paste bear with me that transcription into chat GBT. And I can say, Can you give me five bullet summary of this interview? And that’s great. Or I can ask it, can you give me you know, a short paragraph summary? Because that I can then use both to remind myself what it was about for my own, you know, if I want to do an intro for the podcast, for example, or perhaps for a social media post for a description on the blog, and so on, right, so giving it content asking it to summarize is going to be pretty accurate. Another thing which I haven’t used professionally, but I thought was quite useful when somebody in a Facebook group asked, Hey, can you tell us what you do as if you’re talking to an eight year old? And so I asked chat, GBT, hey, this is my bio, can you reword it as in a tone that was appropriate for an eight year old, and it did a really good job.
And it’s quite a good way to test if your bio if your headline if your description is actually saying what you wanted to say. And to be honest, mine wasn’t quite capturing what I wanted it to be. So that’s really useful. I also have, of course, the solo podcast, which again, I transcribed via otter.ai. So I can paste the transcript of this conversation with myself, this podcast episode, and asked, Can you please draft a short Instagram post with hashtags for to promote this podcast episode, or a Youtube description with hashtags, right? And, again, a little warning, the character count isn’t accurate, it doesn’t actually give you as short as you want it to. So do check the number of characters. Same for Google meta description, by the way, hey, this is my blog. Can you write me a I think it’s 155, right character meta description for Google.
So that’s really useful. That’s me putting my content in and asking you to summarize, then you can also get it to draft something. So let’s say an email, I want to promote my free book promotion for Book Day. Can you draft an email? Obviously, I have to put my say, obviously, but you need to be quite specific. The name of the book is this you know, in honor of World Book Day, on this date, etcetera, Cetera, right, so give it a really specific purpose content, and then it can draft an email. I actually rewrote my bio rewrite my podcast, actually, the podcast description, I ended up writing myself because I didn’t think it did a good job. But my bio, what I found, and this may help you, if you’re a little bit shy, a little bit humble, like I am, haha, humble brag, then I’ve actually found it to be more confident and assertive than I would be. In fact, I entered myself for a couple of awards recently, which I’m sure I won’t get. But that’s the attitude.
But I thought it was just a interesting exercise to do. And it write my pitch in a much more confident way than I would have done. And I often ask it to write a more compelling by, for example, a more compelling pitch, because I tend to be a bit sort of Oh, no, he may be too. So it’s quite good. Now, a couple of things. I thought it was a little bit too arrogant. And then I said, Can you write that with slightly less arrogance, please, which is you know, that’s the conversation, you can have copywriting for your website, generating ideas, hey, can you give me 10? blog article ideas for the topic of ethical marketing of choosing the right business model in your business or building a personal brand, right? So just getting ideas for content?
You can also ideally feed it with your existing Hey, my most popular posts articles have been on these topics. What else can I write about this? Oh, my last workshop was on this topic. My last article, what can I do next? Brainstorming the names of programs. So I’m really, I’m thinking of a new high level program. And I’m, I’m, I want to say desperately, that’s the wrong word. But I’m very keen to find a really cool word name for it. And so far, it hasn’t quite come up with the way we wanted it to. But it’s because I’ve got sort of yeah, maybe high expectations it needs to be in it might need to be the URL available and needs to of course not have any other competitor have that the trademark and say one, but you know, you can ask it for 10 ideas on the concept of, okay, this business freedom accelerator or something, or this is gonna be the inner circle for High Level Mastermind and workshops, it has worked, I did the skyrocket your productivity workshop a couple of months ago, probably when you listen to this, and I certainly wouldn’t have used that terminology myself. So fun to experiment with these things. Books, by the way. And my friend and former colleague has used it for a new book on AI, in fact, and got the title from from chat GPT. Another thing for b2b So for my business work, corporate work, I asked it, I was toying with the idea.
And I’m still kind of drafting it or writing a white paper. So I asked it just initially, to try to see how this tool worked. How should I structure a white paper? And then what are 10 ideas for titles on this topic? What kind of data points should I use to justify my points? So those are some ideas, right? And I know there are so many others, but if you’re not using it yet, I hope there’s one or two things that you can use in that write, summarizing things, writing drafting posts for you. I’ve also shared Oh, this is a quote I want to share my own quote on, funnily enough, that’s another mistake it made. So I said, Can you write me an accompanying LinkedIn post for this quote, and it did it for me and it made up a name, I think, and I said, No, no, you’re wrong. That quote is by Anna Lundberg, can you please correct it? And it did such so sorry. I’ve now credited it to the right person.
So so can you accompany this quote with a post? And again, it’s not 100% what you want it to be, but it just gives you ideas and alternatives.
Which does remind me. I don’t know if you’ve ever Googled yourself, which you of course should as part of your online brand audit. I did chat GPT. Myself, and I was pretty thrilled with the answer. Because there is another Anna Lundberg, who is an actress beautiful. I’m not sure if she’s married, but she’s had a baby with is it Michael Sheen, I was confused Michael Sheen and Martin Sheen, I want to say Michael Sheen, the UK actor who I love as well. And she’s always dammit, she’s always infiltrated my media presence online if you search for Anna limbo, but chat GPT did come back with Anna Lundberg as a coach and consultant or, you know, author of this book, blah, blah, blah. And I did say, Hey, are you saying that just because I’m Anna, are you saying that because this is the most prominent person? And they said, no, no, it’s the most prominent person I didn’t know that you were on. So you know, maybe chat CBT was just catering to my ego, but that did make me feel quite good. So have to have fun with it and see if it knows who you are. And if not, that’s the opportunity to build your personal brand. Find a way of using it. And this is so sad. And also counterproductive to what I’m selling myself in my business. But it’s actually using as a sounding board, almost like a bit of a mentor, you know, a co worker, a co founder, because you know, it gets lonely as a solopreneur. And Lucas sitting next to me some days, he did help me with a little conundrum yesterday, but it’s not for him, it’s not for your partner, or your kids or whatever, to necessarily help you maybe you don’t want to involve family or friends or they’re not experts, or whatever it is. So having, of course, a mastermind, a peer group, a mentor is so valuable. And I wouldn’t replace any of those human contact points with with this AI tool. But some days it’s been I’ve really been having conversations with all day. Not like, you know, falling in love with it as some films have depicted. But really, hey, what do you think of this? Yeah, that could work? Can I make it more compelling? And all I’m thinking about this, or do you think and so on. And it’s actually, you know, it’s quite fun to play around with, but also has been pretty useful. So a few final tips, the more specific you are in your input, the more specific your output will be, right? If you just say write an article about this, it’s not going to be in your tone of voice. And so I would imagine, I haven’t got there yet. But if I gave it, you know, 10 of my articles and asked it to write in my voice, it could probably do it.
I think, you know, famously, people have asked it to write in the style of Shakespeare or church or wherever it is, and it does a pretty good job. So if we can learn your style, that’s amazing.
I’d also say don’t just copy paste, what it produces verbatim, right? Please use your brain it goes without saying, but also adapt it to your own style and voice. I don’t know what the legal thing is. Now, at the moment, I don’t know if it’s completely original content. You know, if I asked one question, you asked the same question, would you get the same article and content? I don’t know, it’s an interesting thing to check. But but you know, to be sure, I would, for now at least be quite careful with using it. I would use it to summarize, to draft to brainstorm, and so on. And let’s keep an eye on it all of us. And above all, I think learning to use prompts effectively will be really important, right? So the way you ask Alexa can’t say her loudly in case she responds. The way you Google back in the day, I remember when we first started searching for things, you should put quotation marks, you shouldn’t have the end, or in there and so on, right? And actually, of course, Google has become much more sophisticated now. But chatty between my team and replace Google and learning to use the right prompt to get the answer you need will be a really important skill. So as as ever and in particular on this topic. I’d love to hear from you. Podcast, that one step outside.com. Or any social channel, we’re connected. How are you using it? What do you think about it? Are you worried? Are you excited? Have you got ideas for how I can use it differently? Or how you think we shouldn’t be using it? I’d love to start a conversation on there. So hope that was useful. Little bit of a list of of ways in which I’m using it. I’m sure that will evolve and I’ll come back to it later. So how to use chat GBT as a solopreneur. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you next week. Bye for now.
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