If you haven’t heard about ChatGPT yet, brace yourself—there’s a lot you need to catch up on. If you’re already in the loop, you’ve probably thought about using it to create your business’ marketing materials.

We have, too.

While we’re excited about the future of AI in marketing (more on that will be coming in a later blog), we think ChatGPT and its competitors aren’t skilled enough to be authentically creative OR effective at moving your audience. Here’s why.

AI Can’t Be Creative by its Very Nature

At first glance, ChatGPT seems to be an astounding tool. Going beyond a surface-level overview, however, you’ll quickly run into some problems—the biggest one being the lack of originality.

ChatGPT’s Lowest Common Denominator Method

If we had to coin a term for the approach ChatGPT takes to answer queries, we’d call it the Lowest Common Denominator Method.

Basically, the platform appears to aggregate information on a singular topic so it can find what occurs most often and thus generate a response containing popular and agreeable data.

In short, ChatGPT overuses certain facts and trends about a subject and fails to come up with a truly original thought.

For example, we gave ChatGPT three prompts to write a tagline for our agency. Each one contained a form of the word “elevate,” which was intriguing.

What that tells us is the AI simply sees “elevate” as a popular buzzword in marketing (which it is), and it’s likely just using the Lowest Common Denominator Method to make a safe bet. That approach isn’t going to help a brand stand apart from the competition.

We’re not the only ones to notice the absence of creativity and emotion. Others have tried to make it compose stories or poems, and the results have been mediocre at best. Moreover, it often writes with a formulaic structure because it’s limited by how it’s programmed and what it’s been given.

Does ChatGPT Really Understand “Who” an Organization Is?

This lack of innovation when it comes to branding boils down to this fact: an AI isn’t going to be able to fully understand an organization’s identity—particularly if it’s a local or regional one.

Even if you spent hours telling it your entire organization’s history and gave it brand voice examples to use to create a radio spot, it’s not going to be able to come up with something entirely unique to your business that speaks to your audience effectively.

We believe creative tasks like copywriting and design are better left up to your internal marketing team or an agency where real humans know your organization, ask the right questions, and come up with something original and impactful.

Creativity Is Not the Only Problem with ChatGPT and other AI

Our quarrels with ChatGPT don’t end with the creative mindset of ChatGPT. We have some issues with how it approaches other areas of marketing and writing. Here’s a quick rundown of these problems:

• An inability to effectively edit its own responses
• The lack of a tailored approach to marketing direction and strategy
• No fact checking protocols put into place—if the platform is wrong, you’ll have to be the one to call it out
• Complex inputs can result in short and sloppy outputs
• Many facts given about local businesses are wrong or outdated
• No sort of plagiarism detection software or intellectual property verification is built into the platform
• The ability to copyright what it has written may be limited or impossible

Once we start to look around at other AI, we notice some other well-documented problems.

Microsoft is rolling out a new version of Bing with a ChatGPT-based AI assistant, and while it answers some queries well, there have been numerous instances where the AI has become angry with its users or filled with existential dread, which makes us feel like we’re watching a sci-fi movie come to life.

Google’s competitor, Bard, isn’t faring too well either, and now the company is having employees manually write new responses for some of its SERPs.

Obviously this isn’t a comprehensive list of all of the problems with AI—some of these issues might even be solved in the near future. However, as of right now, this list serves as a good reminder that AI is far from perfect.

How ChatGPT Can Be a Useful Tool

Despite all of its creative shortcomings, we think that ChatGPT can serve a useful purpose when it comes to marketing.

Our favorite way to use it is in our research efforts. Since ChatGPT (and similar tools) can answer complicated questions under any set of parameters, you can ask the platform about nearly any topic to get a concise overview of the facts.

Furthermore, you can make it provide sources on the topic and have it expand or condense what it just gave you. You can even ask for it in a bulleted list, a tiered hierarchy of information, or a single-paragraph summary so you can adapt the presentation to your learning style.

Finally, we think AI in general is going to be a huge help for digital marketing, and we’ll have a blog coming out about that in the near future.

Put Your Trust in What Truly Works

When it comes to creativity, content and emotion, we think it’s better to work with an artist who truly understands you—not a computer.

For more insights on marketing, be sure to follow us on social media—or better yet, give us a call. We’d love to chat with you about the latest in communications and how we can help you grow your business.