When I started a digital marketing agency in 1994 (about 3 months after the advent of the internet), it was because I believed that this new technology would forever change the world. Today, it may be impossible for any of us to live without these valuable resources and tools. It has changed virtually every aspect of our lives.
Over the past 3 decades, we have led our clients forward as our connected world and these technologies continue to evolve. There have been many significant advances along the way:
- The smart phone
- Streaming media
- Better search engines
- Efficient eCommerce
- Social media platforms
Despite the impacts these other advancements have had, AI is a true gamechanger. This charge is being led by ChatGPT.
There are many other AI tools flooding the market. These tools allow users to do everything from writing ad copy to generating marketing videos to analyzing financial data to helping plan corporate strategy.
As a market leader, Webolutions explores these tools daily. We follow the latest advancements, test them, and use them to help our clients create a competitive advantage. In this article, we will share our thoughts and outline some of the leading AI tools available today. Then each month, we will bring you practical insights into how these tools can be used to advance your business goals.
Read our article: How to Become and Remain a Market Leader with Continuous Innovation
AI’s Recent Surge
After ChatGPT’s initial release from OpenAI on November 30th, 2022, the adoption rates of this groundbreaking tool and related services have soared.
It has set the record for the fastest growing user base in history. After only two months in existence, around 13 million unique visitors used ChatGPT every day in January 2023, doubling the number of users in December. The latest data shows that in just 5 days, ChatGPT surpassed 1 million users and that it currently has over 100 million users. The underlying technology (OpenAI) gets approximately 1 billion visits per month.
On March 14th, GPT-4 was released. GPT-4 is 10 times more advanced than its predecessor, GPT-3.5. This enhancement enables the model to better understand context and distinguish nuances, resulting in more accurate and coherent responses. Furthermore, GPT-4 has a maximum token limit of 32,000 (equivalent to 25,000 words), which is a significant increase from GPT-3.5’s 4,000 tokens (equivalent to 3,125 words).
“We spent 6 months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned. GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” – OpenAI
Practical Uses of ChatGPT
ChatGPT and other AI tools should be seen as a content assistant, not a replacement for human marketers. While they provide great information, they still lack context. ChatGPT had a knowledge cutoff date of September 2021. After this time, it has no knowledge of current events. In addition, all generated content should be reviewed to ensure it aligns with company values and goals and does not contain biases.
Some great ways to use AI to increase your creativity and productivity include:
- Brainstorming fresh content & thought leadership opportunities
- Adapting existing content to a specific audience persona / vertical
- Repurposing existing long-form content into new content
- Developing new email nurture campaigns
- SEO planning & persona research
- Generating A/B testing variations of ad creative or landing page copy
- Turning an event or call transcript into content
- Generating talking points & assist in developing marketing strategies
- Designing spreadsheets & dashboards
- Writing video scripts & storyboards
- Suggesting feedback / improvements on content or strategies
- Changing the voice in which something is written
- Generating email subject lines (including A/B test variations)
- Repurposing sales collateral into drip campaigns / email content
- Writing event descriptions and develop interesting questions for panelists
Leading AI Tools
Below we have outlined many of the most popular and talked about AI tools, including a link to their website and some notes about what they do.
Multi-Purpose Tools
- ChatGPT
- A breakthrough conversational AI tool that can chat with you, answer questions, generate content and even challenge incorrect assumptions. According to ChatGPT, “I am ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI, based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture. I am designed to process natural language and generate human-like responses to textual inputs. I was trained on a massive corpus of text data, which includes books, articles, and websites. My training enables me to understand and respond to a wide range of questions and topics, from factual information to creative writing prompts. As an AI language model, I am continuously improving through new updates and training data, which allows me to offer more accurate and relevant responses over time.”
Writing
- Anyword
- Ad & Marketing Copywriting
- Writer
- Content generation without data risk. This tool also has an AI detector. Enter a URL or text and it will calculate a ‘Human Generated Content’ score.
- Rytr
- Allows you to generate text and select your specific tone
- QuillBot
- Paraphrases your content so that AI is not detectable
- Quetext
- Plagiarism checker
- Content at Scale
- AI detector and content generation tools
Image Creation
- Midjourney
- Image generation
- Dahl-E
- Image generation from OpenAI
- Beautiful
- Generate creative designs, charts, and graphics
Video Creation & Editing
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- Video editor
- Synthesia
- Type to video with a selected avatar or custom scene. Create your own custom avatar using a video recording of yourself. You can even synthesize your voice so your avatar sounds like you.
- ElevenLabs
- Clones your voice. You can type and it will read it back in your voice.
- Murf
- Library of voices that you can use for studio quality voice overs
- FlexClip
- Video editing
- Fliki
- Creates videos from your blog posts using realistic voices
- Runway
- Image and video generation
- Syllaby
- Find what questions people are asking about in any industry and create a social media video script
- Dreamix
- Video editing – provide an image or video and a text prompt and it will create the video
Personal Productivity
- Cody
- Personal assistant for anything you want to know. You can upload knowledge and access this using simple text prompts.
- Lavendar
- A personal email coach to make you more effective
- Whisper
- Transcribes speech to text
- Repurpose
- Shares your content across your social media accounts for easer posting
- Finchat AI
- ChatGPT for Personal Finance
- Merlin
- An AI content aggregator that provides easy access to all your content
Sensitive Information
As with all new tools that change the world, using AI does require some cautions. Never submit sensitive information to AI tools that might accidentally share your information with others. Even with some basic information, AI can infer further details about you, such as your political leanings, race, etc., even if you do not specifically share these details.
Some information that you should not currently share with AI tools might include:
- Human resource records with PPI
- Private company information
- Private personal information
- Information that can be used to infer things about you that you’d rather keep private
Prompts
An “AI prompt” is a specifically crafted request to an AI tool designed to generate the desired response. An example of an AI prompt could be something like, “create a 500-word blog post outlining the best practices of SEO written by an SEO expert.” Learning how to interact with AI and asking the right questions allows the AI to help you more.
Prompt engineering is a new field resulting from the adoption of AI. This area of specialty is growing rapidly and is even offered via online learning courses. A Prompt Engineer is a professional who specializes in developing, refining and optimizing AI-generated text prompts to ensure they are accurate, engaging and relevant for various applications. They also collaborate with different teams to improve the prompt generation process and overall AI system performance.
There are also websites and tools that help AI users create better AI prompts. These are called prompt libraries. Some of the more popular prompt libraries include:
FAQs – AI Impacts, Tools & Insights
Can AI write about anything?
ChatGPT can write intelligently on virtually any subject. The only limitation is that its access to information was cut off in September of 2021. So, if you were to ask about the hockey score from last night’s game, it has no context.
Are AI tools free?
Like all online tools, some are free and some are not. Many of the tools offer a free or scaled down version with paid premium options.
Can Google identify AI generated content?
Many people believe that Google can identify AI generated content and that using this content could jeopardize your SEO rankings. In Google’s most recent statement about AI content, they state, “Our focus on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced, is a useful guide that has helped us deliver reliable, high quality results for users for years.”
But that doesn’t exactly answer the question. Our recommendation is that if you are going to generate AI content, it should be reviewed and edited by a person to ensure accuracy, brand alignment and the beliefs of the company. This editing should result in original content.
What To Do Next
All of this can seem somewhat overwhelming. However, we are entering a new age of tools that allow people to be more productive. If you are newer to AI, we recommend going to ChatGPT, spending some time there and understanding what is possible. Ask some questions and ask ChatGPT to respond as if it were someone. Ask it to create an outline for an article or a presentation for you. Get used to how it works. After that, start using some of the other tools outlined in this article to better understand how you use AI to help you.
About Webolutions
Webolutions is a full-spectrum management consulting and strategic growth implementation agency. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique stories to life, empowering them to scale faster, smarter, and easier.
Areas of expertise:
- Differentiating Brand Development
- Marketing & Communications Strategies
- Customer Journey Mapping & CRM Systems Execution
- Enterprise Website & Application Development
- Cross-Platform Data Systems Integration
- Organizational Development Strategies
- Team Alignment, Culture, & Performance Solutions
- Business Performance Intelligence Systems
