How We’re Using ChatGPT to Support our Content Creation
With AI systems becoming increasingly capable and widely-used, we asked our Student Content Manager, Maree Perkins, to explain how we will (and won't) be using ChatGPT to help create student-facing content.
You would have to be living under a rock to have missed the wave of conversation about AI-powered tools and the incredible speed at which they’re developing. Whether it’s Google’s Bard, Bing’s Sydney or Office’s Copilot tool, AI is becoming part of everyone’s daily lives.
We’ve been having lots of conversations in house about the possibilities ChatGPT in particular could provide when it comes to content creation.
SPOILER ALERT: Our content has always been, and will always be, human-written and user-centric. But I wanted to share with you how we’re trialing ChatGPT in the content team to help us not only create great content but do it more efficiently, so we’ve a bit more time for that blue sky thinking! Perhaps these ideas will inspire you to pick up the chat as well.
Use cases for ChatGPT
Top of content summaries
Sometimes you have to give Google a helping hand when it comes to working out what your content is and why it’s relevant to the user search intent. Summaries at the top of the page can be a great way to do this - and we’ve got a lot of pages that could do with summarising!
So we’re going to trial using ChatGPT to create short summary sections of our already published content to improve the user experience (and our SERP position) as well as saving our team time.
FAQs
We know that FAQs are a great way to answer our users’ questions without them having to search through lots of information. They’re also a great way of moving people around your website as you can provide a direct answer but also link to more in-depth explanations that they can follow up with.
While our team are great at building FAQs, they can be time-consuming - so we’re going to see where ChatGPT can help in the process. We’ll be trialing how useful it is at coming up with questions to include in FAQs. We’ll also see how well it can identify information we’ve already published about a subject and suggest which bits would work well for an FAQ.
Breaking up long form guides
We pride ourselves on our informative content guides on FindAMasters and FindAPhD. They are our bread and butter, where we take all the complicated (and often hard to find) information on topics such as funding, fees and visas, and turn into useful and informative guides for our audience.
We wanted to see if breaking down these longer form guides into smaller chunks of more specific detail would help serve the user need better. We’ve already been trialing this with some of our international study guides. Now, we’re going to see how ChatGPT would suggest breaking up and remixing the articles in attempt to scale up their production.
Avoiding pitfalls
One of the big current drawbacks of tools like ChatGPT is the validity of the information they provide. This is where the test of efficiency comes into play. If it takes less time to write copy but more time to fact-check it, then it’s not helping the team.
For those of you who are a bit more advanced, there are settings that you can tweak with GTP3.5 or GTP4 (rather than ChatGPT) which control how creative the outputs are. It’s about turning the dial so the chatbot is not completely robotic and flat, but it’s also not hallucinating in La-La-Land.
Looking forward
What is important to remember for us is that we see AI-powered tools as something that can help us do our jobs, not do our jobs for us. All of the above examples are us working with the tool in a way that helps either unlock some creativity or creates efficiencies.
We’ll keep you posted on how our trials with ChatpGPT go, but hopefully this has given you some idea of how AI-powered tools might be able to help you with your role. Things are moving fast, so even in the time it’s taken you to read this blog, the models will have got better and more accurate!
Soon, AI will be everywhere so being an early adopter and having that first mover advantage is something to think about. Just make sure you’re using it in a way that doesn’t go against your values and always have the user front of mind!
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