If you’ve ever been responsible for the content of a blog or other project, you know it can be both invigorating and exhausting. It is a remarkable way to communicate with a group of people who know and trust you, but at the same time it is daunting to have to come up with that content every single day/week/month.
For example, I have a huge admiration for people who do a daily podcast. I don’t think anyone wants to hear from me that often, nor do I think I have that much to say. Many however persevere. My husband and co-founder of The Orange Effect Foundation (OEF), Joe Pulizzi, has done a weekly marketing podcast with his partner in crime, Robert Rose, for years. They are two very busy individuals so the scheduling alone can be tough, much less coming up with the show flow for the hour-long episode every single week.
Since the inception of OEF, I have helped manage the content for the blog. I haven’t always done a great job. Sometimes I didn’t prioritize it, (aka I forgot), and sometimes I just couldn’t come up with anything to say.
So, as we were rolling into the new year I decided I was going to do what a good content manager should do and start working ahead. Having a plan for the content well before it was due, so that I wouldn’t be twiddling my thumbs trying to figure out what to write.
I made a list from number 1 to number 52. One for each week of the year (as we post on this blog once per week) with the intent to come up with 52 topics for the year. A few were easy, as we do a post each quarter with how much money we have funded with that round of applications, or we have fundraisers coming up that we talk about.
I didn’t even make it halfway. I was truly disappointed. I thought I had this brilliant idea and I was going to be so well prepared, and well, no.
Now What?
The next idea was to consider some paid content. In our years of publishing on this blog we have never done that. Maybe it was time. We could optimize for SEO, and all the things paid content can do, that I as a “lay” person don’t do when writing a blog. I ran the idea past a few folks who pretty much balked at it.
One person however said “Why don’t you try ChatGPT?” I had heard of this phenomenon because of my work in the creator economy. Essentially, it is a tool that creates content for you via a big computer brain. I’m not a fan of things (yet) that aren’t created by real people, but I know the world is moving that way with or without me. And desperate times call for desperate measures, right?
So I created an account with all the skepticism I could muster and put in the writing prompt, “What are the top three benefits of Speech Therapy?” Within 10 seconds I had the following response:
Here are three potential benefits of speech therapy:
- Improved communication skills: Speech therapy can help individuals with speech and language disorders improve their ability to communicate effectively with others. This can include improving their pronunciation, expanding their vocabulary, and learning new language skills.
- Enhanced social interactions: Effective communication is a key factor in social interactions, and speech therapy can help individuals with speech and language disorders improve their social skills. This can include learning how to start and maintain conversations, understanding social cues, and expressing themselves in social situations.
- Increased independence: For individuals with severe speech and language disorders, the inability to communicate effectively can lead to dependence on others for basic needs. Speech therapy can help these individuals become more independent by improving their communication skills and enabling them to express their needs and wants more effectively.
Wow.
I mean spot on.
Grammatically correct, informationally correct, and only 10 seconds of my time.
So am I a complete convert? Not just yet. Remember that for me the content needs a personal touch. It needs to be a conversation between me and the audience. However, will I keep my Open.AI account and use it as a resource? Absolutely.
In almost every industry today it is important to keep up with the available technology. It is changing very quickly but in many cases, including for kids who have difficulty communicating verbally, it is making huge advances. It’s important for all of us to not rule it out. To see what benefits it has to offer for the problem we are trying to solve before we just rule it out. What can technology help you with?
