Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve surely heard about ChatGPT. Some are welcoming it with open arms as if it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Others, on the other hand, are rather skeptical, with well warranted reasons in their own right. For starters, one of the pillars of effective and successful marketing is quality content, after all, the adage ‘content is king’ is a theory many marketers the world over strive to put into practice. Therefore, whether ChatGPT has a place in content creation or not, is a highly debatable topic. 

We reached out to Courtney Gilmore of NoDepositKings, whose site is known for the quality of its content:

‘Let me be honest, I’m a writer at heart, so I enjoy investing my time and efforts into a good article. Which is why it’s a hard pill to swallow when thinking about the prospect of being replaced by a chatbot. It kind of diminishes the importance to human writers who take pride in content creation. With that being said, however, one cannot negate the fact that it’s a nifty and surprisingly responsive time-saving tool. But I guess as with everything else, you need to strike a balance. The last thing you want is to be churning out content like some factory, where articles are mass produced and have no substance.’

But how exactly do you strike a balance? To answer this question, we’ll go into the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT and suggest ways of maximizing its potential while steering away from its undeveloped capabilities.

The Potential of This Chatbot

As cynical as many may be, there are certainly a number of advantages that come with ChatGPT, otherwise it wouldn’t have become this multi-billion dollar overnight success story. So let’s take a look at some of its useful features.

#1 Brainstorming

ChatGPT is a fantastic tool to generate ideas that you can work with. If you’re the type to feel the pressure of a blank page, ChatGPT is your friend as it provides you with some great points to spark your creativity and jumpstart your flow state.

#2 Research

As we will point out in the next section, the content of this chatbot is limited in its accuracy, reliability, relevance and validity. Still, if you’re struggling to figure all the major concepts related to a particular subject, with this new technology you can make sure that you hit all the main points. Instead of racking your brain to make sure that you’ve mentioned everything, you can leave that work up to ChatGPT, while you focus on verifying the information and edit for tone, precision and style.

#3 Proofreading

If you struggle to dot the i’s and cross the t’s before submitting a piece of writing, then you can take advantage of ChatGPT’s built-in editor to polish your work. Since it can identify grammatical errors and suggest ways of enhancing your writing, you can also use this tool as a way of strengthening your grammatical skills and learning new ways of expressing yourself in writing. 

#4 Summarizing

Have you ever come across a really interesting article but then realized it’s too long to read? Hey, there’s ChatGPT! You can instruct this chatbot to summarize the article for you or to give you a number of key takeaways from a specific text. Just like that, you can know more while reading less!

What ChatGPT are ChatGPT’s Shortcomings?

As great as this chatbot is, it’s certainly not devoid of shortcomings. Therefore before jumping on this OpenAI bandwagon, it’s good to keep in mind its deficiencies…

#1. Limited Accuracy

This is a big one. ChatGPT works by predicting which words should come after the previous word in a sentence on a paragraph on a given topic. Therefore, it can generate information that may sound plausible but would not actually be accurate and reliable. For one, it is engineered in a way that avoids topics of graphic violence, and other dark subjects. This is by definition a form of biased content.

#2. The Style Leaves Much To Be Desired

Well, it is a chatbot after all, and while it can help us in many ways, surely style and tone are not its fortes. Although the information it gives might be useful, the flavor of the text tends to be very bland, apart from sounding rather vague at times. In fact, since there’s no human element behind it, there tends to be a lack of character in the writing. You see, although a particular response might be satisfactory, there’s no real point-of-view behind it, no passion about a particular topic, which tends to be a distinguishing feature of human-generated content.

#3. Not Up To Speed On Current Affairs

This mechanism is ill-informed about any content created after 2021, which further renders its relevance highly questionable. Therefore, journalists and other content creators who need to provide fresh and updated material, should definitely not entertain the thought of using this chatbot as their work companion.

#4. Vulnerable To Detection

Tools such as ZeroGPT, Corrector App and many others are already out there to prevent misuse of ChatGPT. Therefore, don’t give in to the temptation of handing over your work to a chatbot. You need to think of ChatGPT as a tool that can help you speed up your writing process. Like any other helpful tool, it should be used mindfully. It would serve you and your audience best if you simply employ it as an assistant that can carry out the simple tasks for you so that you can focus on more creative and complex tasks, to deliver more quality content in less time.