Posts

Humanizing AI-Generated Content: A Guide for Content Teams

2 hands touching showing humanization of AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed how we create and consume content.

While most people equate generative AI with ChatGPT, it can create everything from text to images, and even music. Exciting as that may be, there’s some anxiety that using generative AI without human intervention could lead to unintended consequences.

To explore this concern, let’s look at how to make sure the output from generative AI is more human.

How Generative AI Works

The best way to use any tool is to first understand how it works. We’ll use ChatGPT as our example, since the same concepts extend to any generative AI application, whether it’s text, image, or audio.

Stephen Wolfram wrote an excellent article on how ChatGPT, and large language models (LLMs), work. In the simplest of terms, explains the author, it’s “just adding one word at a time.” It can do that convincingly, having “learned” patterns and relationships between words and phrases through training on massive amounts of text data.

Obviously there’s far more to the story, which you can read for yourself. But it’ll suffice for our purpose. After all, you don’t have to know how to build a car to drive one.

So, analyzing those billions of pages helps the model determine what’s likely to come next, given the text it already has. It’s quick and efficient. But it’s not perfect.

Why Humanizing the Output from Generative AI is Necessary?

There’s no doubt that generative AI can be incredibly useful. But using it without any human supervision can lead to unintended consequences, and they’re not good. Here are some reasons humanizing the output from generative AI is necessary:

  1. Lack of creativity: while generative AI can string words together in different combinations, it can’t experience things in the way a human can. By itself, it may produce unoriginal and uninspiring content.
  2. Bias: there’s the potential for bias in what generative AI produces. Since it learns from existing data, any bias contained in that dataset could be reflected in the output. As a result, the generated content may be considered unfair or discriminatory.
  3. Inappropriate content: likewise, a generative AI system may create violent or offensive content if trained on violent or offensive data.
  4. Factual inaccuracy: generative AI has been trained to “make stuff up” and can do so very convincingly. Being a machine, it doesn’t know that this is wrong. But those mistakes can lead to serious consequences. It’s even more critical when dealing with your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) topics, or when a generation has lots of statements of fact, numbers, dates, proper nouns, etc.
  5. Brand Image: if content produced by an AI system is low quality, biased, inappropriate, or inaccurate, it can damage a brand’s reputation or worse.

The Role of Generative AI on Your Content Team

Generative AI can enable you to become “ignorable at scale,” Jay Acunzo says. And at worst, it could cause harm. But introducing humans into the process changes the dynamics.

Here are some considerations when implementing generative AI:

  1. Evaluate the training data, if possible: verify that the model uses data, carefully curated to avoid bias and inappropriate content. If the software vendor can’t confirm this, then assume the worst. It’s not a deal-breaker, but you’ll have to be extra vigilant when editing the output.
  2. Create and use guidelines: all content, whether generated in whole or in part, needs to meet certain standards. You don’t necessarily have to govern how to use the tool, but rather its output. Those guidelines typically cover aspects such as appropriateness, bias, quality, and creativity. You may already have these in place — make sure to apply them, especially, to content generated by AI.
  3. Re-evaluate the way you create content: don’t substitute generative AI for human writers. Instead, use it to augment their output. Generative AI may require more contributing editors, where they function as part writer and part editor.
  4. Refine the editing process: use an AI text classifier to check for AI-generated text, like you would a plagiarism checker. They’re not perfect and it won’t provide you with a binary choice. But it may alert you to instances where an editor needs to be more vigilant. The old motto of “trust but verify” only applies to humans. When generative AI is involved, it’s just “verify.” Thanks to generative AI, we may see the rise of the subject matter expert editor (SMEE) to fill this gap.
  5. Verify: when checking for appropriateness, look for usage of proper nouns, numbers, dates, declarative statements and strategic insight that could be debateable or could conflict with your brand voice. Also, avoid generating content that absolutely must be correct, if you don’t plan on fact-checking rigorously.

How to Humanize Generative AI Output

While content production is undergoing disruption, the need for humans remains. No surprise here, but the only way to humanize generative AI output is to include humans into the process. So, if you’re thinking ChatGPT is your content production easy button, look elsewhere.

Here are some ways to make generative AI output more human:

  1. Insert humans into the loop. I’ve said it already, but it bears repeating. Humans need to be part of the decision-making process — both in writing and editing.
  2. Motivate writers to contribute their expertise. Large language models can at best mimick competence. But there’s no substitute for the real thing.
  3. Encourage writers to elaborate on points generated by AI, sharing a story that reflects their unique experience.
  4. Make sure that every piece, where possible, establishes a clear point of view that reflects the writer’s experience. Generative AI can fake this to a certain extent, but there’s nothing like the real thing.
  5. Use idioms — that’s a phrase with a figurative meaning. The AI can’t wrap its head around that one. See how I used an idiom there!?
  6. Use your thoughts and feelings to bring depth to the generated output. Generative AI has no feeling. The best it can do is imitate.
  7. Offer unique insight through the connection of different concepts that others may not have considered. Referring to the way generative AI works, ChatGPT can’t do this because it doesn’t “know” anything.

Takeaways

Generative AI can be remarkably advantageous. But using it without any human supervision can lead to unintended consequences. Here we’re speaking of the type that’s not good. You can avoid these through careful consideration of how to responsibly employ AI in the content production process.

Some content is purely functional and the expectation level is low. Take corporate earnings reports, for example, where factual accuracy is the prime requirement.

But when the expectations are higher, pure generative AI is bound to disappoint. The only way to avoid that situation is by keeping humans in the loop.

Use AI Responsibly

AI can positively impact content teams when used conscientiously. If you’re concerned about the caliber of your content, but don’t know where to start, MarketMuse’s AI-powered platform can objectively evaluate your content quality. Try MarketMuse today.

The post Humanizing AI-Generated Content: A Guide for Content Teams appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=5388

/by

Does Marketing Have A Marketing Problem?

picture of taylor swift album reputation

Ask most people what marketing is and they will describe an ad, tell you a story of a sleazy salesperson, or mention something funny they saw on TikTok.

Most people think Marketing is someone trying to sell you something. And they don’t think of it as a good thing. And to some people, marketing just equates to lying.

Marketing has a marketing problem. Marketing suffers from a poor job of branding.

image of seth godin with a pinochio nose from his book all marketers are liars

As a role, a function, a college major, marketing lacks credibility.

But marketing and selling are different things. While advertising is a form of marketing, it is not the only thing, or the biggest thing marketers do, or the thing that delivers the best marketing results.

It’s time that marketers understood the task before them.

For decades marketers were asked to tell the world “buy our stuff” and “Our products are awesome” to the most people with the highest frequency possibly. We measured our success according to whether you’ve maximized your budget for reach and frequency.

Many CMOs still measure their success based on the size of their budget, and the awareness of their brand. After all, who can blame them? But executives in most organizations are demanding more from us. They want accountability, measurement, and ROI.

In the coming years, Marketing will go in 2 distinct directions:

  1. Marketing will become recognized as a strategic function and a driver of revenue for companies
  2. Marketing will be relegated to projects, tasks, and campaigns that can be outsources to an agency

Which direction will you take?

Here are 5 reasons why Marketers must start to take some action:

1. The Internet Changed Everything

As the internet started to take shape, companies turned their fancy corporate brochures into fancy corporate websites. But their function was the same. Here is who we are, what we sell and why we are better. Traditional advertising campaigns from the 1950s and 60s were translated into banner ads which was fine when click-through rates saw double digit percent. Today, we see banner ad click through rates averaging .06%. Banners have 99 problems and  click ain’t one!

Back in 1994, Search engines were this cool new thing where anyone, anywhere could access all the information they could want. Social media became a way for everyone all over the world to become connected. Smartphones combined these 2 technologies into the palm of our hand.

With so much fun stuff to do on our phones, we started to ignore boring and self-serving banner ads on websites and television.

That is why 80% of CEOs are unhappy with the job marketing is doing.

So what is marketing going to do now?

Source: SmartInsights.com

2. The Content Marketing Imperative

This was the title of a presentation I was giving about 10 years ago. I probably delivered a version of this presentation 100 times, in 20 different places. The main point:

The world has changed, most marketing stinks, and as marketers, we need to create content that attracts and converts new buyers based on helpful information. That is the content marketing imperative.

The Content Marketing Imperative from Michael Brenner

3. The Battle for Customer Attention.

This is the title of another presentation I delivered all over the world. Helpful content, Thought Leadership, and brand storytelling are the new game for marketers. We need to attract buyers instead of trying to buy them with ads and promotion no one wants.

For a long time, at some businesses, marketers have simply executed the tactics, checked the boxes and collected a paycheck. But those days are quickly coming to an end, and businesses need to understand how to reach their customers in today’s attention-starved world.

The Battle For Customer Attention from Michael Brenner

4. Marketing is a Conversation

I have always defined marketing as a conversation between a customer and a company. A 2-way dialogue where the most important thing is the feedback you get. Speak an ugly lie and your audience will reward you with anger. Tell a powerful story, share an interesting fact, solve a real problem, and your audience pays you with their attention and focus.

Good marketing today looks a lot more like publishing, requiring a strategy, customer-focus, and great writers, someone to share it and someone to measure the results.

The best marketers today have moved past just “pushing product” into emotional storytelling.

We know that behind every visit, share and purchase is a person, and we need to meet the needs of those people in the most human way. At the same time, we need to measure our results, not just on conversions, but also in the rankings and traffic we earn with organic search.

The best marketing today starts with an understanding of the keywords used and the questions asked by an audience.

5. Marketing Must Earn Respect

Serving customers serves the business. Your customers want stories, not ads. Marketing-led companies would focus on meeting customer needs through products of course, but also with the marketing that they produce.

This belief increases innovation and experimentation. Products become better and employees become more engaged in helping customers solve a problem, telling their stories and sharing them online. Customers then buy more and feel better about their purchases.

This is the promise of today’s marketing-led company.

Ask your executive team how much they value customer insights. Ask your leaders what role marketing could play in setting the strategy. Customer insights lead to better customer experiences. Product innovation moves faster, employee engagement goes up, sales increase and maybe, finally, marketing earns some respect.

As I’ve said so many times, “we all know the world has changed due to digital, social and mobile technologies. Our customers are tuning out ineffective marketing content. Content marketing is an imperative because it represents the biggest gap between what brands produce and the content our customer actually want.”

Source: Wiz Advisors

How To Fix Marketing’s Marketing Problem

Customer and Results-Focused Marketing Strategy

How do we do that? Start by understanding the keywords your audience is using, the questions they are asking, the challenges they are facing, the topics that matter most, the trends in the industry. Notice none of these have anything to do with your product. Then align this research with the marketing content and campaigns you are creating.

Every marketing activity must be aligned with something that matters to your customers.

8 stages of marketing strategy diagram

Source: ThreeGirlsMedia.com

Building a Business Case for Better Marketing

Do you rank for the keywords identified above? Most executives and sales people understand the importance of search because they actually talk to customers. How well do your marketing campaigns deliver ROI.

Your company leaders wants to see ROI from Marketing, But those same people are the ones asking you to do marketing things that don’t deliver marketing ROI. The business case for better marketing is to reach, engage, convert and retain new buyers to your business in a way that is more affordable and more efficient than you have in the past.

That means delivering content that drives conversions, and removing unnecessary campaigns based on executive whims.

Marketing Leadership

In my book, Mean People Suck, I talk about the art of the pushback. The pushback is about saying no to bad content ideas and bad campaign concepts. It means stop doing what doesn’t work – even if it means you lose that sports stadium sponsorship budget.

CEOs don’t want CMOs who just say yes to every request. They want marketers who are leaders. Show ROI, present customer insights, drive innovation, activate your most engaged employee storytellers.

Focus on Demand Generation Strategies The Deliver Leads and Revenue

The most effective revenue and demand generation strategies all have one thing in common: they are always-on. By continuously publishing your content and pushing campaign messages consistently, you get to see what works and what doesn’t. You can stop the things that don’t resonate. Double down on the things that convert.

While working at one major technology brand, I was able to deliver 10x the marketing ROI with an always-on content campaign than all the rest of marketing, with only 20% of the budget!

Measure and Present ROI

We have to know how to measure marketing ROI. But we also need to know how to present it to senior leaders who don’t care about our tactics. Telling stories is one of the most basic, and under-taught lessons in the entire business world.

Marketing Is Awesome

I spent nearly my entire career in marketing. I never imagines this journey when I started. But I became a marketer because I was frustrated with the support I received as a salesperson. I succeeded as salesperson by listening to customers. And I followed that same path as a product and corporate and content marketer.

Marketing is awesome because we get to lead our companies in focusing on our customers – attracting new ones, retaining the best ones, driving innovation.

But we need you to help us achieve this vision. What do you say. Are you ready?

Fixing the marketing problem marketing has isn’t going to be easy. But we are helping clients do it every day by delivering ROI-producing content plans that we have tested and proven to work. We align them with the specific needs of your company and audience to create a personalized strategy that drives results.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or schedule a quick consultation to learn more about how we can help you earn more traffic and leads for your business.

The post Does Marketing Have A Marketing Problem? appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

/by