I’ve been meaning to use Chat GPT to help me draft blogs for some time, and finally, last week I took the plunge. New technology can take a while to understand, I tend to have a short attention span, and if I can’t work it out in five seconds I’m off onto the next thing.
Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) replace bloggers?
The short answer is no, it absolutely cannot replace the research rich, emotive and thought provoking blogs that I and many others write. However it CAN help with research. So how does it work?
- Fast facts – You can ask questions, like how many people have asthma in the USA, and the answer is with you in seconds.
- Write blogs – You can ask for a blog about ‘dry eye’ and you will get a 100 or 200 draft blog.
- Images – You can ask for an image and AI will use your description to create something.
Things to beware of with using AI to blog
There are limitations, as with everything, so understanding all these limitations is very important. Whilst it’s fast, faster than I could ever be at finding facts, it’s not always looking or the most trusted and reliable sources. You can teach it to do this by asking more specific questions like – what does Asthma UK say about asthma statistics, and you’ll get that charity’s current figures from their website.
What AI lacks and why it won’t replace human bloggers
I don’t think my job is at risk any time soon for the following reasons:
- I can get the information I need fairly quickly anyway because I know where to look, but for new topics it could be useful to get started
- It’s not critical, and it’s not good at giving both sides of an arguement
- It’s not creative
- It can only work with logic to give you facts and struggles to convey emotional context
- It’s not great for finding the right images for your blog, the best place for those, free images is still Pexels and Unsplash.
Want to give Chat GPT a go with your blog?
It took me ages to work out how this all worked, so here is my Chat GPT #101 guide. It was surprisingly easy once I got started. It’s kind of like those chat bots you get when you need to contact an organisation that has no phone number. You know the ones that return ‘I don’t understand your question’… Ironically those rubbish bots are using AI badly to replace the customer services employee. They can work really well though for the questions customers ask over and over again. So here’s what you do:
- Open the Chat GPT website.
- Click on Open Chat or Image Generator, depending on what you want to try and create. I would caution using the image generator yet, it’s not been very helpful for me at all. Shall we just say it appears to be mostly used by people looking for p*rn… say no more.
- Type in your question
- If you aren’t happy with the answer you can refine your question to get more detail
So to recap, it’s good for research, but check sources and refine your question if you’re not happy with the answer. And give the image generator a miss.
Am I going to keep using AI for my blog posts?
Yes I think I will, it certainly helped me gather some basic facts and create a very short brief to begin crafting, however I had taken me another hour to finish the blog I created using AI. Their version would have been very bland, it was also very repetitive and I had to remove the repetition.
My first attempt at writing a blog using AI was this one, ‘Your guide to ‘dry eye’, symptoms and causes‘.
But I’m definitely not ready to rely solely on AI, it was a pretty bland blog to begin with and I had to spend hours fleshing it out and checkind the stats, but it did help as a frst draft.
Have you used AI to help you write blogs? content? or to do mundane work tasks?
Interesting re the fact-finding and research side, thanks Ruth. P and I tried it the other day – he asked for it to write me a love sonnet. It was really good, scarily so! I don’t think I’ll use it to write posts as I hate having to edit – I like writing straight from the hip, if you know what I mean!
Yeah it did involve A LOT of editing, and was short, with lots of repetition that I had to edit out. So really not a great solution to ever replace blogging yet, but an interesting experiment. I get sent a lot of ‘guest blogs’ and I think some of these use AI because they are mostly terrible.
I’ve used chat GPT in a personal capacity a few times not work wise and I think it has a cold edge to it, you can’t beat the human touch.. Glad you find it useful though.
It is very unemotional and cold, as you say. I think it’s has a long way to go before it replaces our wonderful analytical and emotional brains. I might use it for research but it won’t ever replace my blogs.