You've probably guessed I'm a massive nerd and love technology. I've recently been playing with AI via Chat GPT and I have to say that it's great fun and I'm going to be using it more and more ...
AI generated this image! I've included the uncropped version below!
Apart from my SaaS product YourPCM, I have a legacy digital marketing platform I've developed over the past 10 years. It allows me to create blog posts for my clients. Normally, they just send me their own words to edit, but some send me a URL for a news article to 'pseudo-write' a similar article and some even just say, "Can you create a blog post about this ...".
"For an edit I assign 30 minutes and for a write, I assign an hour!"
And that's to do everything from editing the layout, flow and grammar of the words to finding an image and even assigning keywords and backlinks. It's a well-oiled machine now which is why I give it a fixed time to work on a blog post. Writing usually takes longer as that's an extra stage in the workflow.
However, I'm now using AI in that workflow. I don't bother with third-party systems, I use the Chat GPT API directly which is the heart of everything these third-party systems do anyway. I can type in a prompt like "write a 700-blog post about X including an introduction and conclusions and give 5 references" and it just goes and does it. The more specific you are with Chat GPT, the better the text it returns.
And if I wanted to, I could copy the text from a news article into a Chrome extension called Merlin AI and get it to "write an original version of this text". That just uses some clever prompting with Chat GPT behind the scenes. It's all very clever, but it's convenient because it's built into Chrome.
This week's blog post on yourpcm.uk was created with Chat GPT, but I then went and edited it to suit my own narrative and used that finished set of words as the basis for my blog post. I've also created two other blog posts for my clients this week using text generated by Chat GPT.
The image on this week's yourpcm.uk blog post is also an AI-generated mock-up via Canva and I've created a set of marketing shares using messaging that is AI generated and a set of different mock-ups. The one you can see above was as well.
I even posted an AI-generated image of a black cat in a flat cap on Facebook this morning, and although they're not perfect, you can ask for multiple iterations and refine your 'prompt' to get something you like. The image above of the pretty blonde nerd isn't perfect, but would be with a little editing if I was that way inclined.
Above is a video I created using Synthesia that I added to the yourpcm.uk homepage to give visitors a better idea of what we offer. Again, not perfect, but certainly good enough. I ran that video in a Zoom networking meeting recent (I use OBS so I can switch scenes) and only 1/2 the people knew 'Aimee' wasn't a real member of the YourPCM Growth Team.
I can see myself using her for other things like help videos and if I spend enough time working with the API, I could create personalised introduction videos as part of my onboarding process. I don't have time for that right now, but it's on my whiteboard as something to play with.
"AI's time has come!"
Blog posts, marketing messages, images, videos ... well, it's all possible now with a little time and effort put in by a savvy small business owner. I've been watching YouTube videos about different ways to make money from AI with ebook creation being a good one because you can ask Chat GPT to create an ebook outline on a particular subject and then get it to fill in the chapters one by one as well.
There are many things it can do well, but I do feel that it has limitations. There's no humanity. You can ask Chat GPT to pretend to be a marketing expert or explain an advanced concept for a 5-year-old, but it is very, very dry. That's why I always edit what it creates to add myself to the mix rather than just publishing what it gives me.
But for fun stuff like creating a picture of a black cat in a flat cap on a countryside background, I think it's pretty great. I'm really beginning to understand Chat GPT and how the right prompt will give you better results, though to use it properly and have the ability to tweak settings to produce a closer match to what you want, well, you're going to have to pay.
Chat GPT is the heart of it all and there's a new version coming soon with an updated dataset and a whole load of new experience built-in. I think it's only going to get better over time.
Just don't give it control of any nuclear weapons, ok?
Love, light and logic ...
STEFFI LEWIS
Would you like to know more?
If anything I've written in this blog post resonates with you and you'd like to discover more about ai,
Foodie, sci-fi nut, cat lover, brain aneurysm & cancer survivor, countryside dweller, SaaS entrepreneur, developer and networker.
Published my first website in 1993 for the Open University and am highly experienced with Windows Servers, SQL Server, HTML, Classic ASP, JavaScript, and CSS.
I've also worked as a professional photographer in Los Angeles, USA and been a vision mixer and producer for live television in my time.
I live in a village north of Milton Keynes with my two cats, Baggins and Gimley, and a large planted aquarium full of unruly tropical fish.
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