How I'm Using AI in My Content Creation

Here's three ways I use AI to create content

Happy Thursday! Today I wanted to share how I am using AI in my content creation efforts, as well as my favorite tools for each task.

There are three main ways in which I use AI to create content:

1 - As a research assistant

2 - To generate ideas for content

3 - As a writing assistant

The AI tools I use regularly are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and that list is ordered based on how often I use each tool. For the purposes of this issue, I am considering the free version of each tool.

Most major AI tools are getting a lot of funding right now, so constant changes are being made. That means improvements are being made all the time, and as a result how I use each tool is changing over time.

For now, ChatGPT is the tool I use the most and the one I get the most value from. For most of last year, I used Claude more, but in the last few months, GPT has gotten much better at giving me answers that are more logically sound. GPT can anticipate questions I may ask as a follow up, which saves me time. For instance, if I ask GPT to give me say “The top 5 benefits of using AI for content creation”, GPT would like them and may also give me the top concern for each benefit. Such as point and counterpoint.

Overall, Gemini has been the most disappointing. With all the money Google as poured into AI, I would have expected a more competitive offering by now. It’s improved a bit, but for a long time it was absolutely horrendous.

Here's the three main ways I use AI:

As a research assistant: Here, I lean heavily on Perplexity. Perplexity is technically an AI tool, but I view it as a ‘guided search engine'. I ask a question and it gives me an AI-generated answer, along with the URLs for the information. It's very helpful as a starting point when I want to do research on my own.

Gemini is another tool I have used in the past for research, but it's answers are often laughably bad. In machine learning, it's called a ‘hallucination’ when an AI tool gives you inaccurate information. Often with Gemini, it will give completely false information.

I'm always looking for examples of companies that have utilized a particular tactic to improve it's customer engagement. One night, I was looking for examples of companies that had used customer engagement in a specific way, and finding nothing with Perplexity. Out of desperation, I tried the same query with Gemini immediately gave me an example of a company that was using customer engagement in the exact way I wanted.

Wow! This is great! I asked Gemini to give me the URLs for it's claims. It spits up a list of URLs, I check them and one by one I get 404 Not Found errors on the website. Then I decided to Google the company (who I hadn't heard of).

Turns out, Gemini was faking the URLs and even the COMPANY. Its entire answer was fabricated. So needless to say, I rarely use Gemini for research, and if I do, I am careful to thoroughly check any answers it gives for accuracy.

ChatGPT and Claude don't have internet access in free versions so I don't use them for research. I just go with Perplexity, and it works quite well!

To generate ideas for content: The second way I use AI in my content creation is to generate ideas for content. This is where ChatGPT shines for me. For instance, when I started writing Backstage Pass, I asked ChatGPT to give me the top 10 benefits of customer engagement. It gave me a list, but for each benefit, it also gave me a ‘counterpoint’ or reason why some companies don't want to invest in customer engagement. In the most recent updates, I am finding that ChatGPT does a wonderful job of giving logical answers. It 'thinks' through my question and will often include relevant information that I didn't think to ask for.

Personally, coming up with ideas is where I have always struggled when it comes to content creation. I struggle with finding topics to write about, and I struggle with finding good business examples to illustrate core concepts that I want to talk about. So ChatGPT helps me with ideas, and Perplexity helps me with research. Often, I will start with ChatGPT and asking questions, then when I get it's answers, take those answers to Perplexity and ask Perplexity to give me either company examples or the latest research into that concept. This AI rag-tag works wonderfully well for me when I need help creating content.

As a writing assistant: The third way I use AI in my content creation is as a writing assistant. Up until about 6 months ago, I used Claude exclusively with my writing help. Now, I am using ChatGPT slightly more.

The one thing I like about Claude is it is a bit more 'conversational' in its answers. I like that when it helps me flesh out posts. I try to keep that conversational tone as much as possible. ChatGPT is more logical in its answers, but when it comes to writing, that can lead to more ‘sterile’ and lifeless writing.

Having said that, I really don't use AI to write content for me, and never have. I did an experiment for most of 2023 where I would have Claude (mostly, sometimes I would use ChatGPT) write a post for me, then I would take the post Claude generated and heavily edit it. Basically, I would use the outline that Claude gave me for the post, and then rewrite the majority of the post. For example, Claude might give me a 500-word post on a topic, I would take that 500-word post and by the time I rewrote and edited it, it would end up being a 1,500 word post.

I followed this format for about a year just to see if there was any boost to engagement and/or search engine traffic. I saw nothing. No bump anywhere, so I dumped it. Writing with AI assisting me did increase my productivity, but I saw no noticeable improvement to any KPIs I was tracking, so I dropped it.

Personas/Custom Instructions: My AI secret weapon

When you use AI tools such as Claude or ChatGPT to ether analyze content or have a ‘discussion’, it's often helpful to have the tool adopt a persona. A persona is a representation of another person. It could be your target audience, it could be an expert in a particular field, etc.

For instance, when I was creating my Substack strategy, I spent a lot of time researching Substack with ChatGPT. I created a persona for ChatGPT named Jessica. Jessica was an expert small business coach who excelled at helping content creators generate revenue from their content. That led to ChatGPT giving me answers to questions from the POV of an expert small business coach. Here's a screenshot of some of the parameters I gave ChatGPT:

Another great way you can use personas is during the editing stage of your writing. You can give either ChatGPT or Claude your text, and then say ‘Adopt the persona of (make the persona be your target audience) and review this text. Make suggestions on any areas that need to be expanded on, or any missing points that should be made in order to make this post as relevant as possible to the persona'.

By doing this, the AI tool will review your text through the eyes of your desired audience. It's a great way to find new items to add to your post, or learn what needs to be expanded on.

Another way you could use this would be something like ‘Adopt the persona of Edith, a world-class editor who specializes in improving the readability of text documents. Have Edith review this text and make suggestions on changes to make in order to improve readability. Have Edith add an explanation for her suggested changes'.

In this example, Edith would edit your text to make it more readable but would also explain to you why she made the changes she did. It would teach you how to make similar changes in your own writing moving forward.

BTW, ChatGPT also let's you use Custom Instructions. To access these, create a ChatGPT account and sign in. Then click on your profile and click Customize ChatGPT.

So that's how I am currently using AI to aid in my content creation:

PerplexityAI: Good for research

ChatGPT: My all-round favorite, good for ideation and analyzing text

Claude: Good for analyzing text, more conversational in tone than ChatGPT

I hope this is helpful to you, please leave a comment if you have any questions or if you have a favorite AI tool you are using that I didn't list. There's many out there that I didn't mention, if you have a use case, please share!

On Monday, the free issue of Backstage Pass open to everyone will have the first edition of Marketing and Movies, covering the movie Moneyball, one of my favorites!

Hope each of you has a wonderful weekend!

Mack