I admit it, I gave in and tried ChatGPT out of curiosity.

After reading all the buzz about how marketers and content creators were rushing to the platform to create content galore, I was interested to see how it worked both from a speed and quality of content standpoint.

I was amazed, terrified, and saw a massive opportunity.

Amazed by the speed, terrified by the potential – and the massive opportunity wasn’t to run at it with all my needs and ideas, but to run as far away from it as possible.

Certainly there are use cases where this powerful tool is a good idea. Anything that’s mundane comes to mind, such as data entry. Or time savers, such as chatbots that can support your customer service initiatives

For those who want to use AI to create blogs, articles, and insightful content, I say: go for it, if that’s your cup of tea. However, you should consider:

The De-Personalizing Effect

Honestly, I encourage you to prompt ChatGPT to write an article or blog on a topic you’re passionate about. A topic that you love talking with people about and sharing your insights.

I did and it was painful.

It’s easy to get swept up in the sexiness of a super-fast piece of content that has some smart points to it, but when you see the finished product and think to yourself “Does this sound like me?” unless you’ve been previously writing like a machine (which I hope you haven’t) the answer should be an absolute “no.”

The Loss Of Human Emotion

A no-brainer, right?

How can a machine produce human emotion – and why is human emotion so important to content creation in the first place?

Even something as elementary as a blog post should include some element of emotion to motivate the reader, or move them to some sort of action.

When we produce content, we should be bringing in emotional elements to add value and perspective to our viewpoint. Even super-dry concepts can be made interesting and captivating with the right call to action or emotional tie to acting/not acting on the content.

The Digital Echo Chamber

Yes, I understand that the whole point of AI and machine learning is to evolve and fine-tune over time.

But, today, even when I tweaked my queries, ChatGPT produced quite similar content as a result. Consider your area of expertise and/or the industry in which you’re creating content. Do a quick scan of headlines, tags, and titles and you will find some very similar concepts and discussions, already well articulated.

Now imagine if 10 of your peers all go to ChatGPT with similar ideas and prompts. You should expect that all 11 of you are going to have generic blogs/articles that aren’t going to sound much different from each other, minus that individual, human touch.

Not only does that run the risk of plagiarism in some fashion, it also makes the content boring and way too similar.

Creating More Work?

In my experimentation with ChatGPT, the speed was definitely impressive.

However, when reading the output, there was a massive gap in length, quality of content, and compelling points. Not only did I have to re-read through it, but I wound up spending more time adding in content, providing a better flow, and bringing forth some personality.

This took quite a bit more time because some of the content adjustments were like fitting an oval peg into a round hole. (I know it’s supposed to be a square peg, but I chose oval because, while it wasn’t that far off from what it should be, the results still did not fit.)

Silencing the Storytelling

When I’m creating content or presentations, or coaching others to do the same, the storytelling aspect is non-negotiable.

Personal experience, stories, anecdotes, or analogies create compelling content that sticks with its readers or listeners. Think about putting your name on an article penned by ChatGPT. That machine has not seen what you’ve seen, felt what you’ve felt, or experienced what you have that helps create this content and bring it truly alive.

The ability for the content to resonate with audiences hits a digital wall due to the removal of what we’ll call a “message heartbeat.”

This heartbeat is what makes excellent articles and presentations what they should be: emotional connectors. They allow your audience, whether through written or spoken content, to feel seen heard and heard.

This, to me, is the dealbreaker.

As I have been coaching executives, celebrities, and aspiring speakers on creating and crafting their own messages, this to me is where someone can differentiate themselves. I believe you should retreat to an old school methodology (and by old school, I mean a just few months ago, pre-ChatGPT) where ideas were generated, written, invested in, and crafted ... by you.