When James conceived the creative concept and transformed it into a script, he lived in dorky dad mode, that intangible mix of personal experience, cultural awareness and a writer’s sense of timing that no machine can replicate.

AI bots can help develop time-saving first-draft content.

What AI bots such as ChatGPT can do is help writers save time by composing first drafts that content writers and copywriters can edit. For bulk content needs where the deliverable includes multiple versions, getting started is often the hardest step.

An AI bot’s ability to quickly spit out options could help save time and allow the writer to focus on editing to infuse humanity and the brand’s voice into the copy. Such tasks include:

• First drafts of subject lines, preheaders and metadata

• Content outlines for longer pieces, such as case studies, white papers and high-value blog posts

• Variations on copy for dynamic ads

A solid prompt is the key to getting an AI bot to elicit a good starting point from which humans can edit.

3. AI bots produce better-quality content with better prompts, but so do humans.

Parents of young children know this lesson well. There’s a funny story that my dad used to enjoy telling at the dinner table during holiday family gatherings. It goes like this: When I was about 2 years old, seated in my highchair during a family gathering at my grandmother’s house, I was making a mess while eating, as toddlers will do. My dad, seeing the mess, said, “Dana, lean over!” So I did. To the side. And the whole table erupted in laughter. I followed his command in the literal sense. Had he said, “Dana, lean over your plate,” my developing brain would have processed his command correctly.

Like a child still learning about the world, ChatGPT can’t infer meaning or tone. It takes prompts literally.

To work with AI bots effectively, we must improve our prompting skills. During a recent Content Marketing Institute webinar, “ChatGPT vs. Content Marketing,” one of the presenters lent so much credence to this idea that he said he wanted to get T-shirts with “Prompters” printed on them.

To illustrate this point, the webinar organizers wrote the content they needed for the webinar: promotional emails, social media posts, a presentation outline and follow-up emails. Then they provided a basic summary of the webinar and prompted ChatGPT to create each type of content. The audience did blind, side-by-side comparisons of each and voted on which one they preferred. The voting results were tight, with ChatGPT winning about half the time.

The lesson?

Quality prompting produces quality results. If AI bots are tools we hope to use well, we must hone our prompting skills.

4. AI bots can’t match human experts who combine experience and technical knowledge.

People had a good laugh when Google’s AI bot, Bard, provided incorrect information during its first public demonstration. ChatGPT responses have included mistakes and even fabrications. CNET and Bankrate paused their AI-generated articles after they were found to be riddled with errors.

Just like people, the bots are fallible. There’s a lot of garbage online, and the data sets AI bots train on are drawn from the internet. That means human experts still matter and checking sources must remain a key component of researching a topic.

No chatbot will replace the technical experts who have deep industry and professional knowledge. People such as architects working a brand’s technical service line to troubleshoot a tricky build, engineers who can get to the bottom of a product failure or industry experts who know the quirks of the work site remain invaluable to marketing teams.

Without these human subject matter experts, we can’t become the product and industry authorities we need to be to serve our brands with the authenticity required to connect with their audiences on a personal level.

People connect the dots between facts, figures, experience, empathy and emotion. In the creative industry, that’s what matters most. In other words, humans bring creativity to the creative industry. AI bots can be a tool to boost our industriousness.