The AI Sandwich – Chatbots, AI, And The Marketer’s Conundrum

February 10th, 2023 by Will Scott

AI, Chatbots, and ChatGPT are revolutionizing the way marketers create content.

I don’t believe it’s hyperbole to say, “this changes everything.”

A friend described a good human/AI workflow as an “AI sandwich” and I think that’s about right.

Image of an "AI Sandwich" as imagined by Midjourney

AI Sandwich

I go into much more detail in a post I wrote for Near Media.

AI is analyzing medical images, optimizing energy grids, personalizing education, and driving cars. It is also moving quickly into SEO. ChatGPT is the most newsworthy of these tools, but there are many more..

ChatGPT can render programming code, such as PHP code to write the html for an ascii cat face. 

AI can be used for good, but it can also be used for evil. Cybersecurity researchers are already finding instances of bad actors posting functional malware code to cybercrime forums.

ChatGPT and other AI-enabled tools shine in examples like the code above, where they’re either completely doing the work of humans or significantly shortcutting the process. 

For prototyping, confirming assumptions, and initial fact checking ChatGPT, as an AI writing tool, works well – though a manual review is still advised.

There are also a number of established AI writing tools such as Jasper, Writer, and QuillBot.

Additionally, there are an equal number of AI image-generation tools, such as Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion.

AI tools being used for SEO: ChatGPT, Jasper, and other OpenAI-based tools can be useful in the process of building content.

However, there are concerns that the use of AI tools will lead to content being deemed “unhelpful”. Search Quality Raters are human beings who review Google search results and give feedback on the quality of the results, and they are looking for signals such as Expertise, Authority, and Trust.

In order to support the quality guidelines and their human raters, the best use of AI tools may be an “AI sandwich” where humans write prompts, AI does its thing, and then humans edit and fact check.

However, if we want to produce helpful, trustworthy content, the output of the AI content generation tools will need to be like parts on the shelf that together make the whole.

We are about to see an explosion in AI-generated content, and legitimate content creators will use it to create better content, develop great ideas, and serve their organizations and clients more effectively.

As an old-school SEO, ChatGPT and its peers are a great opportunity for testing and tuning.

As a client-serving marketing organization, we are excited about the ways in which these tools and those still to come will help us produce better, more engaging content.

However, we may see things get worse before they get better.

Be sure to check out my post on Near Media. Your feedback is a gift.

As far as the robot apocalypse goes, I’m hoping our new mechanical overlords will be gentle.