AIs that can produce written responses, like ChatGPT and the soon-to-be released Google Bard, have recently punched through our broader culture. There’s a ton of implications for marketing, such as improved search results, better customized emails, but nothing has been talked about more than what it means for copywriters.
Although ChatGPT and other AIs can generate text, it can’t always do so with the same level of skill as a human. Sure, it sounds very intelligent, but the ideas and the strategy behind them all need to come from the person prompting it.
And prompting an AI is a skill. As @karpathy succinctly tweeted recently, prompting an AI is almost like a programming language itself:
And the old adage “garbage in, garbage out” still applies. Ask it to write a one paragraph description of a new API, for example, and you’ll get mixed results usually full of the kind of B2B jargon most copywriters avoid like the plague. If anyone can tell me why GPT-3 has such a deep love for the word “revolutionize”, I’m all ears.
Generally, the more information you give it, the better the output. Giving it examples of your past work, or a brand’s existing marketing materials, helps. From there, treating your interaction like a conversation and not a transaction is one way to get the output you want. After an initial prompt, ask it to revise - tell it to make it longer or shorter, change the tone, or come up with 5 new options.
As always. you can’t take anything ChatGPT produces as the final word, and it doesn’t have access to the internet so it may not be looking at the most current versions of these webpages. It should always be a starting point for your own investigation. If you’re using it to produce content, it’s essential that you fact check and edit the output before publishing.
With all that being said, here’s five prompts I’ve used recently to help guide my work.
“Compare [website] to [website]”
Basic competitor research is one thing ChatGPT is particularly good at. If given two websites, it can pull out some basic distinctions. This is great in situations where I want to figure out how the brand I’m working with can set themselves apart.
To take this prompt further, I can ask it to pull headlines from both of those pages (“What are some headlines on mailchimp.com?”) so I can compare them to what I’m creating. Sure, I could just scroll the website myself, but it’s really interesting (and convenient) to have all of the headlines together in one list.
One important caveat is that the ChatGPI knowledge base hasn’t browsed the internet since September 2021, so you have to pay these sites a visit yourself to make sure there haven’t been drastic changes.
“Write the following headlines in title case”
Have you ever gotten to the end of an article and realized a client’s brand guidelines ask for title case, not sentence case? ChatGPT can take the manual labor out of minor, time consuming reformatting.
“Find any grammatical errors in the following excerpt”
More discerning than a spellchecker, ChatGPT can be good for pointing out minor errors and smoothing out awkward language. If you’re not in a position where you have a second set of eyes on your work, it can be really helpful to feed what you wrote into ChatGPT and see what it thinks.
“Explain how [X] works to a [Y]”
One thing ChatGPT does really well is explain and summarize. This structure of prompt is great for explaining things you may not understand, which is highly useful in the initial stages of getting to know a new client or project.
It’s also a great starting point for explaining technical concepts very simply. If I wanted to take this prompt further, I would ask ChatGPT to expand on the toy box metaphor, or ask it for other metaphors related to how the cloud works.
Finally, it’s worth saying that the best prompt is the one YOU invent. The phrases above make a great starting point, but nothing beats playing around with the tool yourself and seeing what works for you.