No, ChatGPT Can’t Write that Blog Post for You – But it Can Be a Big Help

By Paul Desmond

A thorough SWOT analysis is crucial to any unbiased competitive content analysis, notably to address Opportunities and Threats, but also to highlight your own Strengths and Weaknesses. Competitive keyword research and the analysis of competitors’ content are twin pillars for ongoing and iterative SWOT analyses conducted over extended periods of time.

Yes, I’m biased. I’m a journalist by training and worked as a reporter and editor for the IT trade newspaper Network World for many years. I’ve been writing for all of my professional life, predominantly about IT topics. So, the idea that some upstart AI engine can craft blog posts as well as I do in a fraction of the time is something of an affront. And I’ve been around long enough not to be immediately impressed with every new “game-changing” technology that comes down the pike.

But, having been writing about technology lo these many years, I’m no Luddite. I welcome any technology that can help me be more productive. 

ChatGPT test drive: research

To illustrate, let’s consider the example of an actual blog post I recently wrote for a client. The topic was how AI will change the insurance industry. 

For starters, I asked ChatGPT: “What are some of the ways AI will impact the insurance industry in the years ahead?” This amounts to research, which is a good use of ChatGPT. It’s a faster, more effective Google search. ChatGPT does all the cutting and pasting for you. 

It came back with a laundry list of items. I whittled it down to those that fit the angle I was pursuing, which had to do with automating underwriting and claims processes. I next conducted an interview with one of the client’s subject matter experts and ran some of the ChatGPT results by him. He agreed with and expanded on some of the suggestions and came up with a few of his own. So, score some points for ChatGPT in the research department.

ChatGPT writing: sub-par 

At this point I had a notes file of nearly 2000 words; plenty of fodder for a blog post. Given the AI theme at hand, I figured I’d give ChatGPT a chance to help again. I fed it my notes file and asked it to turn it into a blog post of about 800 words. 

The result wasn’t horrible, but it was far from publishable, at least in my view. It was basically a series of one-paragraph topics, with little connective tissue between them – also known as transitions, which are a staple of good writing. Instead, ChatGPT put subheads before each paragraph, as if they act as transitions. They don’t, even though many have tried. And not all of the paragraphs made sense in the big picture, even if they read well enough.

Therein lies one of the biggest dangers with ChatGPT: it nearly always comes up with something that sounds pretty good. And given I’d fed it all the data it was using to write the post, I knew it wasn’t outright wrong. (The same cannot be said for content ChatGPT finds on its own, a topic for another day.) 

As a next step, I took my raw notes and turned it into an outline or series of bullet points covering what I wanted the blog post to say. I fed those bullets to ChatGPT and again asked for an 800-word post. The results this time were much the same – another series of discreet paragraphs or thoughts with no transitions, although it did hew to the outline I’d provided. 

While some of the writing was acceptable, I quickly surmised it’d take me longer to find the good stuff and fill in the blanks than to just write the post myself from the bullets I already had. 

Helpful yes, full solution no

But I’m not here to bad-mouth ChatGPT. As I said, it is most definitely helpful in conducting research for blog posts, or any other sort of content. Just don’t expect it to come up with a finished product for you. A human assist is most definitely required.

To learn more about what B2B marketers can expect from ChatGPT, check out our webinar on the topic, ChatGPT Do’s and Don’ts for Tech Content Marketers. I’m joined by another tech veteran, Paul Gillin, former editor-in-chief of Computerworld and one of the founders of Tech Target, along with my SaratogaB2B Group partner and search engine optimization (SEO) expert Charley Spektor. 

You’ll get lots of tips for how best to use ChatGPT to create content along with some innovative thinking about how to use ChatGPT for SEO research, to make sure your content gets in front of viable potential customers. Register now for the live event on Dec. 6 or to watch whenever you like.