I’m just kidding, of course.
The other night we had a great chat with one of my friends.
She’s working for a slightly bigger company with all kinds of departments.
One of these departments is Marketing.
While sitting in one of the Marketing teams’ standups, people started talking about ChatGPT and how it would shape our content consumption and creation habits.
How it would transform the tech writing world.
The latter is something I'm also interested in, so I gave my perspective on this.
Their primary concerns were the following.
Concern 1:
Our company hosts numerous blog posts on how to do certain things with WordPress.
If you can simply ask ChatGPT how to do certain things in WordPress, we would lose visitors and authority because ChatGPT would swallow the traffic.
What’s going to happen to our WordPress influencers and writers?
Concern 2:
What if ChatGPT repurposes some of our original content and represents it as their answer to the user prompts?
Is this stealing?
Let’s address Concern 2 because there was a similar precedence just a few months ago when GitHub Copilot started offering users a closed source code.
Of course, writing about WordPress is different from crafting custom quadratic equations that do super fast calculations.
Chances are your WordPress content is not that original after all.
You could say your article inspired ChatGPT, just as a particular painting style inspired Dall-E.
Although it’s a bit more complicated for art than for tech articles.
Here’s MKBHD's take on this:
Let’s address the 1st problem:
Will your traffic suffer?
Blogs
People read your blog for several reasons.
First, they might not know what they need.
They would search the documentation if they knew what they were looking for.
The answers generated by ChatGPT read more like documentation and don’t have anything personal to it, which leads me to the second reason:
There’s always a personal touch to a blog.
A particular writing style or tone makes one blog more pleasant to read for you than another.
(Tech) Influencers
Pardon me for a short rant on the influencer world:
Will tech influencers or any influencers lose traffic?
No.
That’s because, unlike influencers and coaches, ChatGPT gives you answers.
And people seeking influencers often don’t need answers.
They need a finance guru that shows charts about what the future will look like.
Or a new fitness gadget recommended by Fit-X-Lean that gets you into shape.
A couple of years ago, my friend asked me how I sleep so well and how I keep a strict schedule.
I gave him a simple, 6-step list (I’m a terrible influencer) that I followed for 20 days, which made the schedule stick.
He couldn’t make it to day 3, so he looked for other forms of help.
Sleep tracking app, for sure!
Sleep coach, where do I sign up?
Free PDFs about sleeping. Here’s my email.
People are resistant to change until they have to change.
ChatGPT might make influencers’ work easier, but it won’t dismantle our influencer world.