Amanda Laviana has a theory. “It’s not AI that will put marketers out of work, it’s marketers who know how to use AI that will put marketers who don’t know how to use AI out of work,” she says. “I don't think that there's any AI tool that's anywhere remotely good enough to become the copywriter for any organization — and smart organizations know that. But what not every company has is a set of marketers who can rely on AI to give themselves shortcuts.”

The Senior Marketing Manager for Brand & Content at Plenti, an Australian fintech providing “faster, fairer” personal loans, is one of those marketers who is already leveraging ChatGPT to speed up content creation, referring to it as “the smartest, most well-equipped brainstorm partner ever”.

But ChatGPT “never provides the end result,” notes Laviana, “but it certainly gives me ideas, so when I have something I need to write I do my own research first and get a rough sense of how that's going to work. Then I would take that to ChatGPT and ask it to spit out, say, five hundred words. I’d of course fact check that against what I found myself, then pull pieces out of their article - for example, if it’s communicated something more simply than I've been able to, or it’s given me an angle about the article that I haven't gotten into. It really uncovers a bit of the mystery about the thing that I'm writing about without me even thinking about it."

Laviana notes that "it’s part of the beast of our jobs to be repetitive, but ChatGPT can help us find ways to be original in ways that, before, required us to spend so much time racking our brains or just going with something generic. So I love that ChatGPT gives us back a bit of time to focus on the creativity that we have to sacrifice through the mundane tasks of our day-to-day. It can give us context, give us a bunch of ideas, and then we'll whittle that down and make something great out of it.”

Staying alert for AI "hallucinations"

Laviana adds that content creators need to be aware of ChatGPT’s now well-known tendency to “hallucinate”. “One example is a piece we were writing about the incentives you can get in each of the Australian states and territories for driving an electric vehicle. We already know this information, because EV loans are a major product offering for us” she says.

“If we hadn't known this ahead of time, we may have actually believed it, but we just asked ChatGPT to give us a synopsis of the incentives and it just completely made up this information that was wildly incorrect - it made up amounts of incentive amounts and certain tax benefits that can make driving EVs more affordable. But it sounded so convincing and it would be really easy to believe if we didn’t already know that it was wrong. As a fintech, we actually might be on the line from like a regulator for putting out false information, so it's just a little bit higher stakes in that way.”

Marketing in a regulated environment

Beyond AI, working in a heavily regulated environment brings unique challenges for marketers, given the strict restrictions around advertising financial products. “We have to be careful in the way we talk about the aspirations of what you can do with our products because we are first and foremost a responsible lender. We don't want to sell people on an idea that they can't really afford that they're not going to really be able to repay,” says Laviana.

“Compared to some products, like SaaS products for example, where you go onto a product page and just see very high-level information about product capabilities, often there's not much else in the way of detail. But as a fintech, we don't really have that option. We have to be very, very detail-oriented. We have to include relevant disclosures, disclaimers, and footnotes to ensure we’re acting as a responsible lender and following all of the regulations in our industry.”

How AI will impact marketers in the future

Laviana thinks AI will have a significant impact on SEO going forward. “It’s going to be so much more competitive when everyone has the same ability to level up their content, to scale up their content and improve it to such a degree that the algorithm will have a much harder time deciding who to prioritize because all of the content is so good. I also think AI eventually will completely take over the optimization of that article, which means we’re going to need to be really creative with how we show up in search and the efforts that we make there,” she says.

“It’s not magic and it’s not going to replace humans in the near term, but it does give humans really good shortcuts. That's what's going to become more prominent in the next year or two, where anything that can be automated in a content marketer's job, is going to be automated through AI. Then it’s going to be those creative pieces that AI still can't replicate where humans are going to provide the most value."