Enemies to Lovers: One Content Manager’s Reluctant Romance with ChatGPT
As a Content Manager at a leading tech company in central Tel Aviv, the fear I felt when I first used ChatGPT was primal and immediate.
Well, there goes my job.
Content as a career has seen its last.
The robots have finally taken over.
These are just some of the thoughts that chased through my mind as I played around with ChatGPT-3 last November, asking it to write a few headlines and then a poem for a coworker.
But are those fears — expressed not only by myself but by many of my colleagues — well-founded? Will ChatGPT replace us as content managers and writers? Is ‘content’ as a career path over? Have the robots finally won?
The short answer is: no.
The long answer, as usual, is a bit more complicated.
I can’t fail to find the humor in working at a company called ‘Natural Intelligence,’ while writing about Artificial Intelligence. On the surface, it seems like a plain contradiction in terms, but, as I’ve learned, it’s actually two hands attached to the same body. The body, of course, is Intelligence, and, living in the modern age, we have access to both kinds of it: natural and artificial.
Whether you realize it or not, we’ve been using AI long before ChatGPT was rolled out by OpenAI in late 2022. Predictive text and autocomplete, customer service chat bots, and let’s not forget the algorithms!
So why are we so okay with those forms of AI, but have a major backlash against what is, essentially, just a more sophisticated form of the same technology?
This is where my role as a Content Manager comes in. My early experiences with ChatGPT came in two forms: playing with it myself (with limited success), and being told how great it was by other people on my team. Playing with it was the fun part: I enjoyed seeing how far I could push the AI, usually in the form of having it write a silly song or telling me a scary story. The prompts I was submitting were far from advanced; the knowledge necessary to craft a useful and reusable prompt would come later.
But hearing how great it was from my colleagues caused me some frustration. As someone in charge of content in a company where most of my coworkers are not native English speakers, you can imagine how irritating I found it, when a team member bypassed me, instead opting to pull content directly from ChatGPT. And for those first few months, whenever upper management wrote an email encouraging us to see how we could use ChatGPT for our work, my skin crawled.
It didn’t help that around this time, I attended Content Israel, at which one of the keynote speakers announced that he had adopted ChatGPT for his company and subsequently fired his entire content team. No one actually booed him, but the flood of criticism on LinkedIn following the conference was both unsurprising and kind of hilarious (if there was ever a time to ‘know your audience,’ it was then).
At the same time, it got me thinking about whether GenAI was actually here to steal my job.
Here’s the thing about AI: it needs humans. Just ask ChatGPT to write an original joke or song, or, for that matter, to create a piece of original art. What you’ll get will be a close approximation of what you’re seeking, but not quite. That’s the catch with AI; like every other tool created by humans, it has its utility but also its limitations.
So, how did I, a staunch anti-AI content manager, come to change my tune?
The truth is that GenAI became my best friend, as soon as I discovered that it could help get my work done faster, and with fewer mistakes.
Here are just a few of the tasks that have been made easier with the use of GenAI:
- Ideation
Perhaps the most important and least-discussed use of GenAI is ideation. When I find myself stuck on a piece of content, I will often ask ChatGPT what it “thinks.” More often than not, I don’t end up using what the GenAI suggests to me, but it gets my creative juices flowing. Rather than scheduling a million brainstorming sessions with my team, we can each brainstorm with GenAI.
2. Fact-checking and validation
One of the most time-consuming (and soul-sucking) parts of the content manager’s job is fact-checking. At Natural Intelligence, each CM manages anywhere from 20 to 200 product reviews, each with their own unique set of facts and statistics that have to be kept up to date. Until now, it was a process that took hours, if not days, and left every content manager wishing they had chosen a different career path. GenAI saves time (and our souls!) by cutting down on the time spent validating each product review.
3. “Grunt-work”
In any content job, there’s a percentage of work that can be summed up as ‘grunt work.’ It can have a big impact over time, but it’s thankless work that is hard to measure and that usually no one sees. Work like generating selling points, adding keywords to improve SEO and quality scores, market research for specific features, and of course, compliance checks. Our GPT expert built specific GPT’s for these tasks, to not only simplify the prompting process, but to make tasks that were once hours-long endeavors into just a few minutes.
What does the future hold?
GenAI is still a new tool that we are learning how to use and harness for multiple purposes spanning industries. What went from a shiny new toy to a workplace best practice in the span of a few months is only beginning to show us what it can do.
So, what happened to my fears about being replaced by the robots?
Well, I actually voiced these concerns to my manager, back when GenAI was still in its infancy. What he said resonated with me, and continues to be a mantra: AI won’t replace content managers; content managers who know how to use AI will replace content managers who don’t.
We can’t be afraid of change. AI will only continue to grow in adoption and the “robots” will replace only the ones who don’t learn how to use them to their advantage.
On the other hand, I always make sure to use ‘please’ in my prompts, just in case the robots do one day take over.
