Navigating the A.I. Landscape with Zero Roadmap (Join Us, Won’t You?)
In the spring, I was speaking to a room full of business professionals on using A.I., how it’s changed in the last thirty minutes and how our team has used it for our work. One woman asked us the question: “Do you have an A.I. policy for your team?”
Hm.
I answered honestly, “Nope. But we should.”
So in an increasingly un-ironic next step, I asked ChatGPT to draft an A.I. policy for a content marketing company. What it came back with was obvious and simple. The three page document basically laid out what we already knew: be transparent when you use A.I.
While the world is still trying to figure out where A.I. fits into this larger conversation of producing art and being creative, our team recognizes that there are specific areas of content and image creation that A.I. makes our jobs easier - or, dare say, better - and other areas where it hasn’t quite leveled up.
How We Use A.I.
When I asked our team to sign our A.I. policy, it prompted us to ask more questions. Sure, we’ll be transparent with our clients - but how transparent? For example, several of our teammates use ChatGPT to test email subject lines for better open rates. Would a client care that we used A.I for this? Likely not. For us, ChatGPT is a tool similar to Google - just with more direct and synthesized data. When looking for blog topics on a specific industry each month, we use the platform to develop a few ideas to get started. The results are often more to the point and specific to what we’re looking for than scrolling through Google links.
Here are a few other ways we use A.I. in our day to day:
Summarizing data or information from websites or articles
Creating step by step directions for a process
Generating ideas for blogs and content calendar
Testing email and blog titles for best performance
How We DON’T Use A.I.
It’s important to note that any newer platform, especially one with as much traffic as ChatGPT, will be more susceptible to hackers. For this reason, we do NOT import any sensitive data including financials, email addresses or personal details of ourselves or our clients. Furthermore, we limit how many details we are willing to give the platform to make it smarter. It’s important to know that this system is becoming “smarter” by the hour because of the content we are feeding it (that’s generally how A.I. works). For that reason, we don’t input any trade secrets related to our business or any other business. While it’s unclear how this data could be used, we believe it’s safer to add those details to the content later - off the platform.
Final Thoughts
For our team, all of our A.I. usage boils down to what we believe matters most to our clients and the general public: are we being misleading? That’s where trust breaks down in an already untrustworthy world. And while more of us are turning to A.I. to help automate mundane tasks, we want to be mindful that not every interaction with A.I. is necessarily bad. After all, there’s only a slight difference (for now) between Googling “Blog topics for content marketing agencies” and asking ChatGPT the same question. While no one has all the answers right now, we feel confident that we are at least asking the right questions. And we encourage you to do the same.
Stay curious and let us know your thoughts! We’re all in this together. 📨 cassandra@turnthenextpage.com