A marketing leader (Jasper's VP-level marketer) discusses generative AI's role in content creation: AI can rapidly draft fluent text but is not a one-for-one replacement for human writers. The speaker urges AI literacy training, clear team standards for AI use, stronger editing and creative investment, and responsible deployment to avoid low-quality "junk" content and bias. The transcript also briefly notes HubSpot in an appended ad line.
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All AI is doing is laying down words on a page. There's a lot more to writing than just laying down words on a page. The only thing that's ever really held our ideas back is our ability to convey them well in its scale. And, you know, we're always dogged by deadlines. We take shortcuts, we ruin our own quality because we don't have enough time. This can remove all of that and then hit generate. Now Jasper takes those inputs and gives you an output that's ready to use. This can get out ideas that have never been created before. I think that's really powerful. We just have a responsibility in that as well. I think all of those comparisons of like, oh, AI versus humans, or this tool writes better than you, I think those are all false. I think that what we need to do is to equip writers with these tools, just in the same way that a designer uses Photoshop or a photographer uses a digital camera. These are tools that really only come to life when they're in a true content strategist's hands. Right? AI doesn't become transformational until you do as a writer. And so I think that they're just misguided. And I think it comes from a, you know, a classic place. Right? Everybody's always looking for a faster, easier, quicker way to get things done, and this will help you move faster for sure, but it's just not going to be a 1 for 1 replacement for a writer, and it shouldn't be. Okay, so we now all have this technology at our fingertips, and the next question that marketing leaders are going to have to figure out is how do you really ingrain this as part of your strategy? How do you make sure it's not just a shortcut that your team uses or that there's actual thought put into it? So there's a few things that I'd recommend to start. The first is I'd invest in training your team on AI literacy. Make sure they understand how AI works, make sure they understand its biases, its limitations. Make sure they're looking out for those things in their content. Secondly, set some standards about how you are going to use AI on your teams, when you use it, in what manner, what the editing process looks like, and just be really clear with your team that this is an okay tool to use and that there's a good and a bad way to use it across your marketing. I think it's really important to remember that AI shouldn't be just a copy and paste tool for your marketing team. So Many companies rely on Google for organic distribution of their content. And they've come out really clearly and said, look, we are against junk content. If you are just copying and pasting from an automation tool, or you're hiring 100 freelancers to just churn out content without any substance in it, and, you know, that's not going to rank well. That's not going to do well in distribution. Now, good content, AI assisted or not, will break through and will rise to the top. I think that the playing field has gotten a lot broader now where more people can have the capacity to create the kind of content that some of the bigger shops have been able to do now. And so now actually really good writing, really good design, really good, you know, video production. That's at a premium. So I actually think that, you know, maybe this is idealistic, but I think that it places an even greater importance on the creatives in your staff. Okay, so I think that the thing that people don't really know about AI is actually how it works, right? I think a lot of times people see this as a tool and it's. The learning curve is so small, right? You can get in there, ask a question, and paragraphs will be written or, you know, blocks of code will be written for you. And that's enough for so many people where they're just like, I kind of don't care how it works. I just care that it works and that it helped me get through this blog post faster. But I think that for us to really sort of, you know, make the most of this tool and also stave off some of the flaws and weak points in it, we really do have to drastically increase the literacy when it comes to our understanding of how AI works. AI consumes generative AI in particular, because AI is vast, right? Generative AI is actually just a sliver of it, but it's the one that everyone has been captivated by recently. So generative AI works by consuming just enormous amounts of content or code or the Internet itself and learning through patterns of how that content gets laid out, right? So it reads everything, and through that, it learns sort of natural language and what a logical next word in a sentence could be. And because of this, it's able to do a lot of things, you know, without plagiarism, without sort of ripping lines from the Internet. It's truly just naturally laying down word after word based on that learning. But there's a couple of flaws with that. For starters, most of this, even, even though it's an enormous amount of source material it's still a confined amount of source material. And anytime you're sort of pulling from source material that is capped, you are inherently having a system that is less representative. You're having a system of source material that has some flaws and some inaccuracies in it. Right, right. And so it's amazing because it's like, for as massive as we feel like the source materials are here, they are still kind of limited, but it's enough to get AI to a place where it sounds natural when it produces a sentence. For example, most AI is trained off of content that is a couple years old too. So if you ask what Taylor Swift's most recent album is, it might say an album from a couple of years ago. Most AI is pulled from sets that they're going to necessarily pull in all the biases that humans have in their own writing or training our own biases into the system. All of this is to say that it's an incredibly powerful tool trained in an enormous amount of content, but you still need to edit and you still need to have that human judgment about what is right and what is representative and what your audience cares about in your writing. And that's why I say it truly needs to be a partnership. For as magical as this whole thing is, it's still limited, and it will be for, I think, forever without that human judgment. Over the course of history, there have been a number of these kind of expansion events that have really shifted the way that we communicate with customers, the way that we create as professionals. I think the biggest and most far reaching one is the Internet itself. Right. And I think that this is sort of on that scale of something that is going to, you know, it's kind of been coming for a while and it just accelerated. And in a matter of a few years time, almost everything that we do will be different as a result of this technology. With any kind of transformational technology, there are ways that it has really advanced society and really advanced business, and there are ways that it's been used to just put a bunch of junk out on the Internet or at best, and at worst, you know, do harmful things. Right. And so I think that we actually have a tremendous responsibility to invest more in things like finding original story ideas, invest more in editing, invest more in teaching our teams AI literacy and bias and inclusivity in your content. Now is the time to lean into that stuff so that we can also reap the benefits of this technology at its best. And if we don't do that, I think we fail the technology I think we fail our companies, and I think we fail, you know, the larger industry and society as a whole. I'm a writer. People are like, you know, why would you go work for a generative AI company that's replacing writers, quote, unquote. And the answer is that, like, this is here and we need to steer it in the right direction to reach its potential. I hope that we, as creators and marketers and business leaders, will take the reins of this technology and bend the arc of its use towards something positive. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned. No out of sync spreadsheets or dueling databases. HubSpot grow better.
