Imagine witnessing the invention of the wheel and watching the first horse-drawn carriage transport goods into the town centre. It would be a shocking realisation if, seemingly overnight, your back-breaking trip became far less physically taxing.
New technologies make the lives of human beings easier and every major industrial revolution challenges life as we once knew it. But, as these innovations become normalised, it’s hard to consider ever going back to how things used to be.
The same is true for the rise of AI, the latest technology to shake up our perceptions of how work ought to be done. This innovation has made the world question if human beings will be replaced or if jobs will become redundant.
However, there is no substitute for human ingenuity, only tools that can assist creativity and production. With this in mind, we spoke with several AI experts to gain a foothold on the current and future state of AI-powered content marketing.
The current state of AI-powered content marketing
Generative AI, powered by ChatGPT from OpenAI, is set to revolutionise various industries, including content marketing. The emerging technology uses advanced algorithms and deep learning techniques to generate original content across different mediums, such as text, images, and even computer code, surpassing the capabilities of traditional AI models.
By combining the power of generative AI with human creativity, Contentoo AI is unlocking new levels of innovation and efficiency. Content creators can streamline workflows, generate fresh ideas, and produce engaging content at scale. Brands can develop personalised campaigns, enhance customer experiences, and achieve better business outcomes.
The potential applications of generative AI in content marketing are vast and evolving. This technology will redefine existing strategies, opening up a new world of possibilities for growth.
Our experts agree that we are currently in the “gold-rush era” of AI-powered content marketing. As people jump on the bandwagon, there will be high demand for generative AI. However, as the technology is still in its infancy, brands must use it strategically.
Ultimately, we are just beginning to discover the first use cases. New developments will only continue to accelerate, bringing with them unforeseen challenges.
“It won’t happen without challenges, whether those are legal or ethical implications,” posits Juan Faisal, a senior digital producer based in Los Angeles, United States. “Companies are jumping in without a roadmap on what they are ultimately trying to achieve. We will also see the proliferation of even more “dumb-content,” which will be hardly differentiated from other pieces.”
Large language models like GPT-4 lack human ingenuity and use probability to predict the next sequence of characters based on input. While they can produce reasonable answers and follow instructions, the output may not be as desirable or unique. This is why it is important to keep human beings in the mix to ensure quality content creation.
“Even when combining it with external sources, such as Google search information, and even when fine-tuning these models on specialised content, such as hundreds of your own blog posts, there is no intentional creativity here,” explains Kjeld Oostra, AI Consultant at Entropical.
AI tools are effective when it comes to writing generic blog posts, refreshing content, or expanding on existing content. This technology works best for paraphrasing or generating alternative versions of text. However, for unique perspectives and original ideas, human insight is essential.
“Content marketing has forgotten uniqueness,” argues Arpit Singh, a growth marketing manager based in Mumbai, India. “Few people are adding their perspective to the content and most of the companies are using the AI output as it is. Thought leadership is missing. That’s why Google also updated its search engine algorithm to prioritise thought leadership.”
It is imperative that brands focus on delivering distinctive, valuable content to their audiences. In doing so, they can build credibility, reliability, and trustworthiness with prospective clients, in turn driving sustainable growth.
“It is extremely helpful for humans to augment their marketing skills in terms of content and product marketing,” says Josef Murad, an engineer and technical marketer based in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Overall, brands that use AI-powered content marketing will have a considerable edge. In combining human ingenuity with artificial intelligence, you can ensure the best of both worlds. With this winning combination, you can share unique insights with your audience and scale content simultaneously.
The future state of AI-powered content marketing
Looking into the future, the AI-powered content marketing of tomorrow will be dramatically different. Brands will learn to harness the limitless potential of AI and set themselves apart from competitors. Where previously uniqueness and creativity were often left out of the equation, these qualities will take center stage.
In the next few years ahead, brands will have faster idea generation, which will free up time for more imaginative endeavours. Models will become more powerful and multimodal — building infographics and other marketing materials with audio and visual representations of data and ideas at a moment’s notice. Not only this, but they will get better at following instructions, as live information retrieval is integrated.
“Open-source alternatives will become better and at some point easier to host in a private (albeit managed cloud) environment, and they will support even longer documents (number of tokens),” posits Kjeld Oostra.
At present, AI training and inference limitations are restricted by the ways in which data is stored. Given this, the introduction of any new architecture could prove game-changing. A shift from binary to quantum computing could be unfathomable, bringing with it untold opportunities in terms of speed, volume, and computational power.
Overall, dependency on AI technologies is likely to increase, which could turn content marketing professionals into better editors than writers. Here’s what our experts anticipate is on the horizon in the next 5, 10, and 50 years of AI-powered content marketing
In 5 years
“The shift is from content generation to moderation.”
“Nothing will be the same as everything will be immersive and phygital.”
“There will be more editors than writers. People will lack writing skills, have more ideas, and be dependent on AI tools. The gap between ideas and execution will be decreased by 20x.”
“The full AI automation of simple content and more focus on branding, creativity, and uniqueness for high value content and campaigns.”
“The standard will be full automation of repetitive tasks and data analysis to spot trends and generate first drafts. There will be platforms fully dedicated to creating and optimising prompts. Human and AI collaboration will still be important.”
In 10 years
“Different formats — voice and video — will become dominant.”
“AI will handle more complex tasks and machine creativity will fully take over human-generated content. There will be fewer opportunities for folks in the content space to get their first footing in the industry, with the exception of low-skill jobs dedicated to prompt optimisation. Corporate greed will find a way of using AI to ask even more of workers, paying less.
In 50 years
“In 50 years, everything is singular.”
“The only way humans will be able to compete with AI is by adding AI-powered enhancements to their bodies. We shift from humans as content creators to units of P2P processing to assist data ingestion and output creation.”
If you would like to learn more about how this emerging technology is impacting the world of content marketing, check out our latest report “How to navigate the generative AI revolution”.
