Benefits & Dangers of AI in Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, artificial intelligence (AI) is a double-edged sword—offering up exciting benefits while also having its fair share of pitfalls. As businesses continue to leverage AI to enhance their content strategies, they must do so with a keen understanding of how to maximize the rewards of AI, while mitigating the risks that come along with it. Here we explore some of the benefits and dangers of AI and offer real-world examples, along with tips about how to make the most of this technology in your content marketing strategy. 

Benefit: Unparalleled Personalization

AI empowers content marketers to deliver hyper-personalized experiences to their audiences that are critical to driving engagement. According to a recent study, 72% of consumers engage with personalized marketing content. By analyzing user behavior and preferences, AI algorithms can dynamically tailor content, ensuring each piece resonates with the individual, fostering a deeper connection between the brand and its audience. A great example of this is Netflix’s use of AI algorithms to analyze viewing habits and provide personalized content recommendations, creating a user experience that keeps subscribers engaged.

Benefit: Data-Driven Decision Making

AI also provides valuable insights through data analysis, enabling data-driven decision-making in content marketing strategies. According to a survey, 61% of marketers use AI for data analysis, allowing them to identify trends, understand audience behavior, and optimize content for maximum impact. Google Analytics utilizes machine learning algorithms to give marketers insights into user behavior, helping them refine their content strategies based on real-time data.

Benefit: Content Creation and Generation

AI-driven content creation tools have revolutionized the way marketers generate compelling materials. These tools use natural language processing and machine learning to produce high-quality content quickly and efficiently. In just a short time, approximately 60% of content marketers are now leveraging AI for content creation. ChatGPT can generate human-like text, empowering marketers to create blog posts, social media content, and product descriptions with remarkable efficiency. Additionally, AI algorithms enhance content marketing strategies by optimizing for search engines. Through analysis of search patterns and algorithms, AI assists in crafting SEO-friendly content, boosting visibility, and driving organic traffic. Studies show that 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Google's BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) algorithm refines search queries, allowing content creators to tailor their material to meet user intent and improve search rankings.

Danger: Lack of Timeliness 

Content marketing often involves creating content that is relevant to current trends, industry updates, and the latest developments. AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Because ChatGPT’s last update was in January 2022, it cannot add any new or diverse perspectives that have emerged in the last two years so its content may be stale or outdated. The lack of regular updates means that ChatGPT may not be aware of recent changes or emerging topics, limiting its ability to generate timely and up-to-date content. Additionally, you risk perpetuating outdated thinking or biases that may have been debunked since its last update. There is also a significant push by most big legacy newspapers to ban ChatGPT’s AI crawlers from using its data to train the algorithms which will have an extremely detrimental impact on the quality and quantity of data that AI is using. 

Danger: Plagiarism and False Information

Without human oversight, AI runs the risk of plagiarizing and producing unoriginal content. Unscrupulous actors may use AI to reproduce copyrighted material, posing a significant threat to content creators and their intellectual property. Generative AI models may inadvertently reproduce copyrighted content, leading to legal complications and damage to the original creator's reputation.

Danger: Unintended Consequences and Misinterpretation 

AI algorithms, while powerful, can misinterpret context and intent. This misinterpretation may lead to content that is tone-deaf, offensive, or fails to align with the intended message. Microsoft's AI chatbot, Tay, was shut down after it started generating offensive and inappropriate content, showcasing the potential for unintended consequences in AI-driven content. 

Danger: It’s Only as Interesting as the Person Using It

AI technology is not yet producing highly sophisticated and engaging copy and we ran the tests to prove it. We asked ChatGPT to provide content for five dozen blog posts for different industries ranging from consumer-facing to technical. The first one was decent, but as we read on it became clear that the cadence and the vocabulary it spits out are highly repetitive and extremely formulaic. If you were to publish this pedestrian content, not only would your customers be extremely bored, but you could also risk tanking your SEO rankings because algorithms are on the lookout for content that reads as if it were written by or for robots. 

 Businesses are right to utilize AI to increase productivity and the efficacy of their content marketing campaigns, but they should never do so without careful human involvement. By staying mindful of timeliness, prioritizing the human touch, and rigorous checking for misinterpretation, companies can unlock the true potential of AI while safeguarding the authenticity and connection that define successful content marketing in the digital age.