Speaking as someone who hires lots of writers, ChatGPT isn’t going to replace anyone just yet. The content GPT-4 produces is impressive, but the bar is higher now because everyone has access to the same tool.

The best way to use AI for content creation is to think of it as a reasoning engine. This metaphor helps because it distinguishes knowledge from reasoning. Instead of relying on AI to provide the expertise, it’s your job to bring the knowledge, and ChatGPT can figure out how to phrase it.

Feed your expertise and ideas into the prompt, and GPT-4 will articulate them. It can mimic a writer’s style, adjust the tone, play with word counts, modulate the amount of figurative language…all in milliseconds, without rest, for $0.000004/hour.

The problem begins when you try to create content about things you lack expertise in. This happens in most scenarios where content creation is outsourced to the cheapest writers possible. ChatGPT is not a knowledge base, if you use it as one, you will create bland cardboard content.

Take responsibility for supplying the expertise, and ChatGPT can speed up content creation process. Writers can use it to build outlines, blow through procrastination, come up with counter arguments for ideas, generate loads of great options for titles, proofread, it’s even great for creating meta descriptions, and all the other fiddly stuff your CMS needs.

Hamish Davidson runs an online fashion store. He creates blog posts that address relevant questions on a topic from Google’s “People Also Ask” section. This means that he’s figured out how to automate a large chunk of the writing process, but still keep his content relevant and can ensure the information is accurate.

There’s lots of emphasis on AI detection. Most of it is misguided. Google doesn’t have a problem with using AI to create content. Search engines just want you to create useful, helpful content. Do that and they don’t care how you create it.

A good way to make sure you’re following Google’s guidelines is to use their self-assessment questions for creating people-first content. I turned the questions into a prompt for writing people first content that anyone can use to evaluate their content.

So AI will not be replacing anyone just yet, but it does speed up the content creation process. The upside for small businesses, at least for now, is that it has made establishing topical authority much cheaper. As the cost of content production decreases, more small businesses can generate lots of valuable content in a domain and become authorities in their field.