AI In Content Marketing: Trend, Friend Or Foe?

There’s no denying artificial intelligence (AI) in content marketing is a trend with major implications for the future of content and copy. But whether it’s a well-intentioned collaborator to bounce ideas off of or a heartless bot ready to replace humanity depends on who you ask.

We don’t usually do this at Blue Compass, but I’m going to break the fourth wall today and talk to you as a writer. Who am I? Let me start there. I’m Ashley, a copywriter at Blue Compass. A web wordsmith, if you will. I ideate, write and edit a variety of short and long-form content for our clients, from blogs and web pages to social posts and ad campaigns. So talking to you as a writer, my first instinct was to give ChatGPT a wide berth when it first launched publicly in 2022. Call it aversion to change. I didn’t know how it fit into my job, and I’m not afraid to admit I was worried for the future of writing. But I was also 24 years old at the time and knew I wouldn’t be able to avoid AI throughout my whole career. 

So, in the spirit of keeping my friends close and enemies closer, I put AI to the test to challenge my discomfort and form my own conclusion. Is AI a trend, friend or foe in the grand scheme of content marketing? My answer: D, all of the above, depending on how you use it! Today, using ChatGPT for content creation still has many writers and marketers conflicted and social media users abuzz online trying to distinguish real people from robots. Now more than ever, I feel the need to take a thoughtful look at the future of writing for marketing and the role we’ll play in it as humans and marketers.

But First, Let’s Break Down The ‘AI Em Dash’ Controversy

If you thought the Oxford comma was divisive, wait until you hear about the em dash. If you’re on LinkedIn or TikTok, you’ve likely glimpsed heated debates about the em dash, a seemingly innocent punctuation mark used to provoke thought or place emphasis in a sentence. However, if you ask Gen Z sleuths online, it may be provoking thought and placing emphasis on the fact that the content in question was written by AI.

As a writer and a member of Gen Z, my first instinct stumbling upon this punctuation debacle was to feel betrayed. Enraged. Mournful. The em dash and I go way back. In fact, human content has a long history of favoring the em dash, decades and even centuries before AI started spitting them out left and right. For all I know, Shakespeare’s middle name was Em Dash. And my beloved em dash certainly inspired me to write this article because it called into question the same concerns my 24-year-old self had about the role of a writer and even humanity itself. Like I did in the past, I decided to challenge my first instinct to panic and instead investigate within ChatGPT myself. While I’ll admit Gen Z may be on to something, I think there’s a deeper meaning here that holds promise for the future of writing for marketing.

Writing With ChatGPT: A Writer’s Pursuit Of Justice

Writing with ChatGPT in a brainstorming or creative capacity is something we’ve embraced in our roles as digital marketers here at Blue Compass, and we’ve enjoyed adding efficiencies to our workflows. But when I feared the em dash was being ripped out of my hands and began questioning my own humanity, I decided it was time to give ChatGPT a new challenge and confronted it head-on. Why are you using the em dash EVERYWHERE and giving real writers a bad rap? You might be a robot, but this feels personal. I began to give ChatGPT writing prompts for made-up scenarios to see if I could suss out this AI em dash problem myself.

I continued to feed it prompts and got more of the same. No matter the prompt, ChatGPT always seemed to include an em dash or two in its response. That’s not so bad. But then I asked it to stop using em dashes altogether. And it promised me. It promised me.

But when I repeated my previous prompt to see if my new friend would follow through…

Betrayed, once again. Not only did ChatGPT repeatedly forget about my em dash rule, it seemed to unironically use em dashes in its responses to me while simultaneously agreeing not to. And just wait until you see what happened when I updated the account-wide settings stating in no uncertain terms that the em dash should not be used in any chat ever, under no circumstances, not even if my life depended on it.

Instead of proving my fellow Gen Zers wrong, I watched as ChatGPT singlehandedly made me lose my faith in the em dash, possibly forever. I modified prompts and settings begging ChatGPT to please stop using the em dash, but a couple messages later, it was right back to its perpetual punctuation usage with seemingly no qualms. Finally, feeling broken, I asked it outright:

And somehow, this admission from ChatGPT is what finally made it click for me that AI isn’t an enemy out to take over writing for marketing content. AI in content marketing follows human writing patterns.

Does ChatGPT Have A Specific Writing Style (& Why Do We Care)?

If something as small as an em dash can incite such opinionated discussions online, this won’t be the last time users try to call out AI vs. human writing. The em dash has been beaten to death by so many writers (it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me) that ChatGPT can’t ignore its prominence even when explicitly told to. Have writers perhaps gotten a bit too dependent on the em dash? Maybe, but that’s a different discussion and beside the point. The point is writers and marketers ultimately control content marketing trends. Because, when prompted, what is ChatGPT’s writing style going to fall back on? What it views as authentic, conversational, people-first human writing conventions. And who creates content speaking to the core desires of what it means to be human? Content marketers! 

While I’m getting philosophical, here’s another question for you: which came first, the chicken or the em dash? The truth is, AI can’t evolve without human marketers setting the tone. There will always be a place for content marketers in the machine learning cycle. The more difficult it becomes to distinguish between human and AI writing, the more it reinforces the value of quality content, timeless patterns and the ability to think outside the box, all attributes that have helped brands prevail and remain in the spotlight long before robots entered the scene.

AI Vs. Human Writing For Marketing

As we can see with the em dash, AI tools like ChatGPT have demonstrated clear difficulty with breaking patterns, giving humans the upper hand in creativity (as long as we don’t get stuck in our own patterns, of course). Strategic direction, authenticity and a unique brand voice are more important than ever to intentionally break the mold and inspire confidence in your business. As humans writing for marketing, we can decide to break common rules of the trade for impact. We can continue to provide a fresh, personal perspective. And we can adapt our writing style on a whim. 

Take this blog, for example. There’s not an em dash in sight! Through a conscious effort not to be mistaken for a bot, I’ve managed to avoid it altogether. Writing with ChatGPT as the sole author would turn blog writing into a series of predictable phrases, punctuation and ideas packaged neatly with a bow and an em dash or two. (Could you feel the em dash wanting to break through in that sentence? It physically pained me not to throw one in.) But writing in collaboration with AI as a tool to enhance and refine content ideation and strategy leaves more room for big-picture thinking, creative thought and a uniquely human touch.

Embracing ChatGPT As A Tool For Content Creation, Not A Substitute

At Blue Compass, we’ve approached AI in content marketing not with an “us vs. it” mentality but instead with collaboration in mind. What can we learn and gain from working with ChatGPT and other AI tools for content creation? The goal is to strike a collaborative balance between authentically serving customers and also being a steward of your business’ time. You don’t have to start from square one or spin your wheels to produce relevant, insightful content for your audience every time. But you also don’t have to quit producing unique content altogether and let the bots have their way with your brand. We’re constantly refining what AI collaboration looks like in our content marketing process, so I asked my digital marketing teammates to weigh in on how it's proven itself useful in our workflows. Here’s what they had to say:

• Content ideation and brainstorming. Campaign ideas, blog topics, social posts, etc. 
• Refinement. Using ChatGPT as an extra set of eyes to help content feel more polished, professional, casual or whatever tone we’re striving for. 
• Structure. After we’ve put together a strategic content outline, we check with ChatGPT to fill in the gaps and suggest any potential points we’ve missed that will make the piece more valuable to our audience.
• Conciseness and character counts. Finding the essential messaging for short-form content like search ads, social media posts and meta titles and descriptions. ChatGPT isn’t personally tied to specific verbiage and can help cut the fluff.
• Content research. Summing up key ideas and finding focal points for the most impact.
• Replication. Plugging in headlines we’ve written for a responsive search ad campaign to generate more ideas and usable headlines when we have a few but need 10 more.
• Variety. If we’re feeling redundant or can’t get past a certain phrase stuck in our head, we’ll ask AI for new ways to get our sentiment across.
• Keyword research. Asking ChatGPT for a solid list of relevant keywords and terminology for a given topic so we have a good starting point when we dive into our keyword research tools.
• Innovation. Us humans often default to patterns and what we do best, as well, so sharing our ideas and planned strategic efforts with ChatGPT or other AI tools helps introduce different concepts for consideration.
• Targeting. Requesting a list of characteristics, job titles, relevant demographics and more to refine our audiences for an ad campaign.
• Schema ideation. ChatGPT helps us think outside of the box when we’re adding schema markup to content so we’re putting our best foot forward for SEO markup.

Notably, we’re not using it to churn out content or replace any part of our outlining, writing, reviewing or implementation stages. Writing with ChatGPT on the sidelines enables efficiencies along the way, but AI platforms will never have the same level of context, communication, big-picture insight and humanity that we possess as a digital marketing team.

Bottom Line: Human Writers Will Continue To Shape Content Marketing Trends

As a human writer, I exercise the right to be biased. And in my biased opinion, humans remain in the driver’s seat, ultimately steering AI as we adjust our processes for writing for marketing to integrate AI collaboration. But you don’t have to just take it from me. Take it from Google, the search engine giant itself! Google has consistently stated that it favors quality content demonstrating experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Mass-produced, auto-generated content has always been a red flag and something the search engine has policies against. It prioritizes people-first content that aims to provide value to users, something people will always need to be involved in to ensure that’s truly the case. What does AI know about being a person?

One of the benefits of using ChatGPT as a tool to enhance content is the fact that writers and content marketers everywhere are contributing to the voice of AI. That’s pretty cool, especially if you’re struggling to understand a different perspective or stuck on one train of thought. So if we do start depending on writing with ChatGPT to shape content for us, we enable an endless cycle where ChatGPT eventually falls back on a library of AI-generated content to keep developing its language learning model, rather than unique human content to pull from. 

Not to mention, your competitors are likely exploring tools like ChatGPT for content creation, too. If all content is shaped from the same language learning model stuck in its patterns and ways, it becomes even more difficult to stand out online. For AI to be useful in content marketing, it will always need genuine human authorship to keep it relevant instead of redundant.

So while the machine is learning from us, what can we learn from the machine? Again, I’m biased because I have the ability to be biased as a human writer with real thoughts and feelings not generated from an amalgamation of content published on the internet (sorry, I needed to get that off my chest). But watch me literally bring it full circle here. AI is stuck in a constant learning cycle, but WE don’t have to turn in circles feeling stuck by ourselves. AI collaboration enables more efficient content creation and ideation when wheels are spinning and you need a starting point. We just have to make sure we don’t let AI end content as we know it by becoming co-dependant and misusing it along the way.

AI Collaboration Is Here To Stay, But Human-Driven Writing Leads The Way Forward

This blog deviated from our normal style at Blue Compass, but I hope that’s the beauty of it. Human marketers have the ability to deviate from the norm when it serves our purposes, while AI tools will always be stuck with the patterns they’ve absorbed over time. Thanks for reading my first-person feelings and allowing me to subtly flex on ChatGPT. Before I go, I humbly ask that you take a moment of silence for all of the em dashes crushed in this article, along with my hopes and dreams of fluid sentences and uninterrupted flow. Because it’s not really about the em dash. It’s about influence and who (or what) has the power to shape content marketing.

— (Ironically, the em dash is the embodiment of a moment of silence, so I refuse to avoid it altogether. It just makes so much sense! Still, I will certainly continue to be more conscious of any of the conventions and patterns I fall back on and remember to challenge myself to write like a human, not a robot.)

OK, enough mourning! If you’re looking for a collaborative partner to help with writing for marketing, trust our team at Blue Compass to put the humanity of your content first and connect with your audience person to person. Contact us for quality brand content that stands out in the competitive, often repetitive, digital landscape.