In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, one question is becoming increasingly common: “Can I ask an AI or LLM (Large Language Model) to write my website content?” As we dive deeper into the tapestry of artificial intelligence, the capabilities of these advanced tools are growing at an astonishing rate, offering new possibilities for businesses and individuals alike.
As you probably noticed this intro is straight from the mouth of ChatGPT. I fed it the title of this article and it was able to write me an entire article about the topic. And it took 30 seconds.
At the moment lots of copywriters are realising just how easy it is to get AI to churn out content at a frightening speed. However this example shows that the output can can sound, well, artificial! And on top of that, sound like every other AI produced article that is flooding the internet. Many writers are using AI without spending enough time checking their work and making it their own.
Just like every writer has their own style and tone of voice, AI content can often be identified by some overused words and phrases that are cringey at best and at worst let your audience know that you just copied ChatGPT’s homework. This is not going to win you any customers and could damage your brand and create a lack of trust between you and your audience.
AI (Artificial Intelligence) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines designed to perform tasks such as learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. An LLM (Large Language Model) is a specific type of AI trained on vast amounts of text data to understand, generate, and manipulate human language. ChatGPT and other AI tools such as Perplexity, Gemini and Claude where you can ask a question and get a personalised response back are LLMs and these are the tools we will be looking at in this article.
So at this point you might be thinking that the hype around AI is greatly exaggerated and maybe we should come back and ask this question again in a few years when the technology has caught up.
While I do agree that AI has not taken over the world Terminator –style just yet, there are ways you can use AI tools to your advantage to save time and effort and still produce high quality, original work.
As any writer will know, nothing is more demoralising than staring at a blank screen not knowing where to start. As derivative as an AI article may be, it does provide a starting block. It can make the task seem less daunting and might inspire a few good ideas or points that are worth including.
There are all sorts of ways you can use it to help generate ideas for what to write about.
We work with a lot of small business owners who are experts in their field but don’t write content on a day-to-day basis. I have found that when given free reign, inexperienced writers often struggle to write with structure. So to help I create content briefs that provide a format for them to follow. This makes sure they cover all the information their audience needs succinctly and include the keywords and topics that enable the content to rank in a search engine.
If you give an AI tool an outline or first draft of your content it can suggest a format that makes it easy to follow and gives room for a web designer to design more exciting, engaging layouts rather being stuck working with huge blocks of text. AI can also give ideas for keywords to include and other suggestions for improving your writing.
Finding useful information is an under-appreciated artform. Whether you’re in a library or a search engine it can be difficult to identify which sources are trustworthy and well-founded and which ones are confidently asserted but groundless opinion.
An LLM has access to an enormous wealth of information and it can summarise the information depending on the context of the question we ask it. This can provide a range of diverse views on a topic at speed, saving you hours of research. As we’ll explore in the next section you still need to fact check the information you use to inform your writing .
A website contains lots of short snippets of content that often get forgotten about during the copywriting phase. This can include service or product excerpts, meta descriptions, sub-headings or image captions. ChatGPT does a pretty good job of filling in the gaps with these short snappy bits of content that are needed here and there. One of my favourite uses is asking it to write alt text for complex images such as graphs or diagrams. This is an important task it can allow users of screen-readers to understand data provided in graphic format, but it can be tedious and time-consuming when done manually on a large-scale.
I am an occasional bird watcher, and I recently asked ChatGPT about starling murmurations, a spectacular natural event where hundreds of thousands of birds move together with a synchronicity and appear as one moving body.
I wanted to know the origin of the word ‘murmuration’. ChatGPT informed me that one of the first written accounts of a Starling murmuration is in a poem “The Starlings” by renowned Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It even provided me one of the verses of this poem which I thought was rather nice.
“Cloudbursts, kestrels, curlews, all come and flow Stare,
ChatGPT (Apparently)
see how swallows swoop and seem to fall,
And, though paddocks ride and ropewalks go, Flocks flank,
they shadow swallow down pied walls.”
However, when I tried to find the rest of the poem, I could find no reference to it when searching for the title or the extract, despite Gerard Manley Hopkins being a very famous poet. When I questioned ChatGPT further about this it responded:
“I apologize for the confusion. The poem “The Starlings” attributed to Gerard Manley Hopkins does not exist. The lines provided in my previous response were not from Hopkins or any known poet.”
![[Prompt] You referenced a poem earlier "The Starlings" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a renowned English poet. Hopkins vividly captures the mesmerizing movement of the starlings in the following lines:
"Cloudbursts, kestrels, curlews, all come and flow
Stare, see how swallows swoop and seem to fall,
And, though paddocks ride and ropewalks go,
Flocks flank, they shadow swallow down pied walls." I haven't been able to find any source for this poem. Is it a real poem?
[ChatGPT response]
I apologize for the confusion. The poem "The Starlings" attributed to Gerard Manley Hopkins does not exist. The lines provided in my previous response were not from Hopkins or any known poet. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a renowned English poet, but he did not write a poem specifically titled "The Starlings" nor did he describe starling murmurations in the lines I mentioned.](https://withdigital.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ChatGPT-conversation-screenshot.png.webp)
Incredibly, this is not unusual and these hallucinations do happen, particularly when you start asking about more niche topics. This is because ChatGPT generates responses based on patterns observed in its training data rather than recalling specific sources. The key takeaway is that you must fact-check what you learn from an LLM.
It is easy to become over reliant on these tools and lose skills that makee us good at what we do. Whether that’s research skills, writing style or generating creative ideas. Perhaps it is worth logging out of the AI tools and writing unaided every now and then to ensure we stay fresh and retain the abilities we’ve been refining throughout our careers.
And if you are a new writer starting your career in the age of AI it is all the more important to give yourself the chance to develop your own writing style independently from AI tools.
If you’re not happy with the output provided by ChatGPT, it may be worth looking at whether your prompt (the question and information you give it) could be improved. See our recent article for some quick tips on how to tailor your prompts to get a better, more useful response.
At the end of the day an LLM is only as good as it’s training data and it’s output will be similar when similar questions are asked by different people. What AI can’t do is provide a unique viewpoint or personal experience. This is what will make your writing stand out and will be what your readers remember and come back for again and again and this should be your goal for every piece of content you produce.
Let AI tools make your life easier by speeding up routine tasks and helping you come up with initial concepts but don’t forget the value you bring to the table. If this content is going to be on your website, representing your business, it needs to sound like you and showcase your personality and expertise.
If you need help writing engaging copy for your website why not get in touch. We can provide advice, editing or a full copywriting service. Give withdigital a call on 01926 330135 or send us a message today.
