All of us marketing folks, business owners, business consultants, we've all been taught and trained that one of the most important things we need to develop and codify for our company is our USP, our Unique Selling Proposition.
The USP helps us explain what makes our company, our products, our services compelling.
It helps us differentiate ourselves from the competition.
It tells our prospects why they should buy from us and not from someone else.
But it seems that when it comes to writing content in 2024, we've all forgotten this business basics 101 of being unique.
Since ChatGPT was released to the public in November 2022, we've all seen how marketers and content creators use ChatGPT to become more productive. Instead of taking six hours to write a content piece, it takes less. And depending on how you use ChatGPT to create your content, it could take a lot less time.
And that's a good thing, right? Do more in less time?
Well, if you're primarily concerned with productivity and producing a certain number of articles per week, then yes, generative AI tools like ChatGPT is fantastic for creating content quickly and easily.
But there's a couple of major negative impacts to your unique selling proposition, your brand, and what makes your company different if you use generative AI to create your content.
In this episode, I'm going to explain why you need to think twice about using chat GPT for content creation.
The first thing we need to understand is how chat GPT and pretty much all generative AI models get their information.
Their data source is anything that has already been published.
Anything that has been digitized and made publicly available.
And this is amazing. I mean, that's a lot of data. And it's measured not in megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, pentabytes, or exabytes.
In 2024, it's something like 150 zettabytes. That's 150 followed by 21 zeros, 150 zettabytes of data out there on the internet.
And that's a lot more capacity than our biological human brains can contain. And that's amazing that AI has access to all that data.
But if you think about it, it's all the same data source.
It's whatever is publicly available.
So when you ask ChatGPT to
Write a blog and maybe you edit it to make it sound more human,
or you ask ChatGPT to create an outline for your blog or web copy, and then you can kind of fill in some of the sections yourself,
or use it to research a topic, you know, as opposed to how we research kind of today right now, we go to Google, we look through the search results, we read a couple of articles from vetted and trusted sources, and that's how we get smart on topic.
But instead of doing that, we're asking ChatGPT to do all of the heavy lifting for us and give us the answers and content.
And it's pulling from the same source of information and whatever bias your particular AI model has.
And by bias, I mean ChatGPT will value certain sources of data and articles over others. And it's not necessarily transparent on what those are or why it values one data source over the other.
And so it's the same data, it's the same bias. There's no unique perspective on a topic.
And unless you go in and heavily edit and reorganize those results, it just spat back to you, your enhanced AI content won't reflect any of the experience, expertise of your subject matter experts in your company.
It can't demonstrate what makes your company unique.
How could it?
Your subject matter experts experience and perspectives are probably not available on the internet.
So how could chat GPT know what makes you and your company different and unique? Generative AI models will give you roughly the same answer no matter who asks the question. Now, some of you are going to tell me that through clever and good prompt engineering, you can get chat GPT to give you more detailed and targeted answers.
And that's absolutely true. Let's set aside for the fact that it still won't provide you that unique perspectives from your company's leaders, engineers, or subject matter experts.
But prompt engineering requires a specific skill set. Thank you, Liam Neeson.
According to Google's search engine generative experience, man, that's a mouthful.
According to Google's SGE, that will cost you somewhere between $47,000 and $72,000 a year.
But who wants to pay for a prompt engineer on top of what we're already paying for a content writer?
Instead, many of us turn to Google and ask it:
"What are the best prompts for chat GPT?"
We get those results, we kind of scan through it without really doing any critical thinking about, huh, is this prompt right for my company? We copy and paste it, put in the settings in chat GPT, we fire it up and ask it to help us create our content.
And now you've entered the sea of sameness.
The data source is the same
The bias is the same
and unless you hired someone with a particular skill set, the prompts are probably all the same.
There's nothing unique.
And the second point is this. Since ChatGPT gives you roughly the same answer to your blog topic or question that you ask,1 and then you take ChatGPT's answer as a foundation for the content you're writing.
You need to ask yourself:
Why shouldn't I just ask ChatGPT the question and not have to read through your repackaging of the same information.
Remember when I said I used Google's search generative experience, SGE, to answer the question of a salary of a prompt engineer?
Well, I didn't even have to read the articles. Google SGE answered my question and it even told me the sources. It was a ZipRecruiter article and a YouTube video.
By the way, I asked ChatGPT4 .0 roughly the same question and the answer gave me back was $63,000 to $183,000 a year for a salary.
Which one's correct? I don't know. That's a topic for later.
So let me circle back.
Why should I go to your website and read your repackaged answer from ChatGPT when I can go directly to ChatGPT or worse, go to someone else's website and get the same answer.
It's this sea of sameness that is hurting your brand, your unique selling proposition, and your sales team.
I talked in a different podcast, how people make purchasing decisions today.
If your content is basically the same as everyone else,
if your answers are basically the same as everyone else,
then as your potential customer, I can no longer tell what makes you different from others because what you're telling me on your website is pretty much the same as everyone else!
And I'm not saying chat GPT is bad for marketing or even content writing.
I use chat GPT myself in my content writing.
But I have a very narrow use case.
And it's this, when I have writer's block and I can't think of the right way to say something, ChatGPT is a great tool to help me come up with a couple of different ways to say the same thing.
You know, I also use generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for quick and dirty research, like how much data is out there on the internet.
And let's be real, AI is not going away.
All these major companies are turning to AI.
So we better learn how to adapt to use it or we're going to get left behind.
Just know and understand that if you are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to create any of your website copy or your blog articles, then you're running the risk of being added to this growing sea of sameness that makes it so difficult for prospects to understand your perspectives, your experience, your expertise, and why should they buy from you?
I hope this was helpful for you. Please visit us at DoWhat .Works for more information and some other great educational content on marketing, sales, and how to get marketing results faster. I'll see you next time.