How GPT-3 Will Change Content Marketing

An Exploration of the Future of Content Marketing With GPT-3

Artificial intelligence has reached new heights and doesn’t show signs of stopping anytime soon. It has penetrated every walk of life and influences us in ways we’re often unaware of. As we’re studying it, in a way, it’s also studying us by feeding on our input.

The latest breakthrough in AI is GPT-3, which can produce near-perfect text. The text is indistinguishable from what a human might have written, as one student has demonstrated by tricking everyone into believing his GPT-3-generated blog posts were written by a person.

What are the implications of this innovative technology for content marketing? We’ll explore this topic in-depth here.

1. What Is GPT-3?

GPT-3 or Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (third generation) is a language model trained on the entirety of the internet content at the time of its making. Thanks to such a vast amount of input, GPT-3 has a unique ability of meta-learning, i.e., responding to any prompt without additional training.

In practice, this means the language model has breathtaking abilities. It can create any content — from short stories and songs to technical manuals — using minimal cues. What’s more, it can generate content in the style of any living or dead author and make it incredibly convincing, as demonstrated in the following tweet:

Another attempt at a longer piece. An imaginary Jerome K. Jerome writes about Twitter. All I needed was the title, the author's name and the first "It"; the rest is done by #gpt3

Here is the full-length version as a PDF

GPT-3 has an impressive 175B machine-learning parameters, i.e., values used to train and perfect it, which explains its so-far unmatched abilities in analyzing and producing human language.

The best thing about this transformer model is that the company behind it, OpenAI, allows access to a beta of the program to many interested parties. This way, many people have already gotten the opportunity to toy around with it and explore its possibilities.

They have come up with many interesting findings and potential uses in the process and even learned that GPT-3 can generate other kinds of language as well. These include guitar tabs, for example, but also something even more impressive — code.

However, they have also discovered potential uses in content marketing, and here are some of them.

2. Potential Uses in Content Marketing

As developers are exploring the potential of GPT-3 in content marketing, new tools are emerging almost daily with a range of impressive abilities. Some of the most popular ones are:

●       Nichesss

●       Copy AI

●       Jasper.ai

●       Copysmith

●       Neural Text

●       Headlime

Most of them are subscription-based and offer a free trial for the curious. What can these GPT-3 tools do?

A. Generating Ideas

One of the biggest issues marketers struggle with is generating new content ideas. GPT-3 content tools can help marketers and writers get fresh ideas for blogs, introductions, product descriptions, video titles, and more.

In this respect, we’ve tested one of the tools — Copy AI —. The tool gave us fresh blog ideas for an imaginary brand called Fruity Cakes that sells “vegan fruit-based cakes.” The name and this short description are all the inputs we have provided. Here’s the result:

Considering our minimal input, the results are more than satisfactory and contain some genuinely good ideas.

B. Writing All Sorts of Copy and Content

Some AI-based tools have been writing news reports for years now (such as the Washington Post’s Heliograf). That’s because this type of content is mostly formulaic and follows a precise pattern.

However, GPT-3 can create any type of content, such as:

●       Blog posts

●       Landing page copy

●       Ads copy

●       Product descriptions, etc.

For example, Nichesss can write an entire blog post based on your title and a couple of sentences of the intro. Writesonic can generate more than 20 types of content. Most of the tools can also create article outlines and more.

C. Helping Writers Get Unstuck

Writers often get stuck in specific places, and getting past this type of writer’s block is essential for finishing any text. Some GPT-3-based tools, such as Headlime, offer a “write for me” option, which can continue the text where you’ve stumbled and go on for as long as you like.

This means that you can have the tool write the rest of the text or just a sentence or two before you take over.

We’ve tested this feature, and the results are pretty impressive:

D. Audio

The implications of this technology go beyond the text. Thanks to various text-to-speech tools, this AI language model can also generate audio material of any kind. For example, it can be useful for audio lessons or even podcasts.

Since GPT-3 can “pretend” to be anyone (who’s left enough recorded language output in the world), we may get audio discussions with various historical figures and hear their potential thoughts on the problems of the contemporary world, for example.

E. Video

Video content is on the rise, and marketers love to use it. AI-based tools can already generate videos using stock photos and other sources to accompany any kind of text. Some examples include Synthesia and Rephrase.ai. GPT-3 might be able to take this ability to the next level.

For example, a marketer could provide it with a prompt, i.e., describe what they want, and the app could generate everything, from the text to the accompanying visuals.

3. Advantages and Disadvantages of GPT-3 in Content Marketing

So far, this language model looks like a dream come true for marketers, but the truth is — it’s far from perfect. Here are some of the most obvious pros and cons of GPT-3 use in content marketing.

A. Potential Advantages of GPT-3

One of the biggest advantages of this innovative technology for content marketers is the ability to automate short-form content generation completely. As you have seen from the examples above, GPT-3 apps can generate everything, from ideas to actual content.

This leads to the next obvious benefit, which is lower costs. Companies get high-quality content at a fraction of the price they pay their writers now. What’s more, that content will still be much better and cheaper than what comes from various content mills.

GPT-3 can even generate the first draft of any long-form content. Then, an editor or a writer can simply go through it and make it more appealing. It saves a lot of time in the process.

Finally, writers can use it in various stages of their writing process — from generating appealing titles and intros to helping them get unstuck.

B. Potential Drawbacks

The first potential drawback of GPT-3-generated content is the lack of human touch. GPT-3 did learn from us, but it can only copy our style — it can’t appeal to emotion. The result is often a cold analysis of an issue instead of a nuanced exploration of the subject.

For example, conversational AI chatbots already have many benefits for businesses but are still unreliable in some fields. A GTP-3-based medical chatbot has advised a mock patient struggling with depression to kill themselves because they lack empathy.

A related issue is bias. We mustn’t forget that GPT-3 has learned from us, and we tend to be biased and express this negative trait online. Developers need to be careful about this and find ways to eliminate bias from the program. Otherwise, marketers need to be highly vigilant of the output of their AI tools.

Another con of this language model is its inability to produce original content. Ultimately, this tool can’t come up with new ideas and conclusions. It can only repeat and spin what has already been said.

4. How Will Search Engines Respond to GPT-3-Generated Content?

Google SEO ultimately exists to help users find the most helpful content online, and businesses should produce the most useful content. However, as the amount of GPT-3-generated content online increases, the search engine may change its policies on healthy SEO practices due to overuse.

Since Google uses a transformer model similar to GPT-3 known as BERT, it will likely be able to detect AI-generated content and make it a black-hat practice. This is just speculation, but it makes sense that Google will ban this type of content because of the massive number of spam blogs that will arise.

5. Will GPT-3 Replace Content Writers?

As writers are fretting over losing their jobs, marketers look forward to much cheaper and more efficient AI-powered alternatives to human writers. But GPT-3 can still not fully replace human writers, and perhaps, it never will be, considering the drawbacks we’ve outlined above.

It’s much more likely that writers will still write with the help of GPT-3 tools, which will make their lives easier. They will rely on them more for repetitive work and use them sporadically when writing original pieces.

This kind of arrangement could also lead to writers producing more content and, thus, lowering their prices, forcing other writers to implement these tools to earn a living.

Conclusion

The GPT-3 technology is already penetrating the world of content marketing, but we are yet to see its full implications for the marketing industry. As we have seen, there are a great number of potential scenarios for the future, and only time can show the actual results.

One thing is certain, though — GPT-3 is a powerful tool, but it’s not without its problems. Thus, we can implement it with great care and work on its shortcomings.