How generative AI has impacted content marketing
Discover how generative AI has impacted content marketing, and what the future holds for our industry with insights from AI expert, Chris Stokel-Walker.
During our CMA B2B Summit 2024, there was one buzzword that kept doing the rounds.
“AI!”
So, there was no better way to end the day packed full of AI anticipation than with our very own specialist, author and esteemed technology journalist, Chris Stokel-Walker.
In this piece, we recap his insightful discussion to see how AI influences our industry and what the future might hold for content marketing.
Chris Stokel-Walker | Author, Journalist and Communicator
With expert journalism featured across high-profile publications like The Times & Sunday Times, The Economist, The Guardian, Bloomberg, and the BBC, Chris Stokel-Walker has made his name as a researcher, academic and writer by specialising in technology, AI and digital culture.
As an author, his works include: ‘How AI Ate The World’, ‘TikTok Boom’, ‘Youtubers’ and ‘The History of the Internet in Byte-Sized Chunks’.
So, while the emergence of AI in content marketing is on the minds of many marketing professionals and business owners, perhaps no one has the credentials to talk about the subject with as much expertise as Chris.
From AI origins to the latest breakthroughs and future concerns, we were invited to unravel whether content marketing is next on the AI menu.
How AI is Changing Content Marketing
“Every day in 2023, around 2000 more news stories were published mentioning artificial intelligence […] From January 1st till May 1st (2024), a new story was published mentioning artificial intelligence every 24 seconds.”
You’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the sweeping wave of artificial intelligence as a topic of discussion over the past year or so. As the most trending topic in technology, AI has fast become the latest buzzword in business and might be the zeitgeist of our age.
But it’s not as if it’s just occurred. The first traces of AI date back over half a century with mathematicians like the great Alan Turing demonstrating machine intelligence with the Turing Test.
So, why has AI suddenly blown up in 2024?
Generative AI Revolution
“We’ve grown accustomed to thinking that this is a new revolutionary, transformative technology when actually maybe we need to have a little bit of additional context.”
The reason AI is experiencing another summer as it did in the past with breakthroughs like the ‘Expert Systems’ in the 1980s or the ‘Deep Learning’ in the early 2010s, is thanks to the generative AI revolution we’ve witnessed recently with programmes like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and DALL-E.
In 2017, an academic paper titled ‘Attention is All You Need’ was published, unlocking something called ‘The Transformer’ (The “T” in ChatGPT). Before this point, AI only focused on specific tasks, but the Transformer enables AI to do everything, at once.
From producing marketing content to interacting in conversation and answering essay questions, generative AI is unleashed to achieve it all, and at the same time if you’d prefer.
So, why hasn’t it taken over?
4 Issues with AI and Content Marketing
“Artificial intelligence is not intelligent […] Productivity is only good when you’re producing good work.”
1: Unreliability
For all the wonders, capabilities and potential AI proves to us in what it can do, it has one fatal flaw.
What it can’t do.
Just like why driverless cars remain off our roads despite the claims of Elon Musk back in 2015/2019 and so on is that AI can’t promise it won’t do the things we don’t want it to.
In other words, AI makes mistakes.
And just like cars driven by humans, content marketing professionals are still here too.
Because AI hasn’t yet reached the stage of automatically generating good quality content free of errors, what it demonstrates is impressive, but where it falters is its inability to guarantee what it produces is factual, let alone engaging or good quality.
2: Biased
If you ask a generative AI tool to create an image of a specific person, such as a job role or nationality, it will present the most stereotypical, generalised result which is not entirely representative of society.
This goes against diversity and inclusivity, and we need no reminder of that importance to businesses and branding. Generative AI uses training data that scans the web like a giant algorithm machine. Impressive as it is, over 50% of online content is in English despite only 16% of the world speaking English as a first language.
Therefore, if you use generative AI for general purposes, your results will not be general. They’ll actually be biased towards the Western world.
3: Creativity
By definition, anything artificial can’t be intelligent. We classify AI as “intelligent” because it’s human-like. But rather than create with intelligence, generative AI simply copies what’s already been published online.
And not everything published online is credible.
For example, if you ask AI to produce a Sci-fi movie script based on a basic plot, it will give you something of that ilk. However, if you asked AI to create a story that has never been told before, it would give you nothing of the sort.
Because it can’t create, it can only copy.
4: Copyright
So, if generative AI is just one big copy machine incapable of creating anything original, surely there are some copyright issues?
Indeed, copyright is a potentially significant problem for people using generative AI to create content. Some copyright owners have already tried to sue AI companies for infringement.
Since AI generates content based on its training data, the way it reproduces information has created a major grey area concerning intellectual property and copyright. This is something we should all be aware of for legal reasons before we invest further.
What Happens to Content Marketing with AI?
“There are differences between better and faster and it’s important to know which one you want to go with.”
There are both positive and negative connotations with AI and content marketing.
On the one hand, the productivity gains made by business owners that can now easily replicate content will be seen as a win for the profit margins but essentially displace the person once responsible for producing that content.
On the other hand, it can benefit neurodiversity, as someone with dyslexia or ADHD can receive the support of AI when working to increase their performance.
Essentially, AI is here to stay and will undoubtedly improve. The change may increase productivity and displace content creators, but we professionals can also learn to live with AI and utilise it for its capabilities.
After all, it’s a tool. And as a tool that can improve our processes, it’s only natural to use it, right?
That depends on what you define as improved. Speed? Yes. Quality? Probably not.
At least, not yet.
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