153: AI in Action: Elevating Your Content Strategy, Customer Service, and Multimedia Experiences

Here are a few ways publishers can use AI in content creation, on their website, and with multimedia and events.

For articles and emails

Get ideas for new articles on a particular subject. For this use, you might want AI that has current information — not, e.g., the older versions of ChatGPT.

Generate summaries of your articles. There’s some indication that providing a summary increases engagement with an article, which seems counter-intuitive at first, but whether it does or not, I think it’s a good service to the reader. Either edit them, or make it clear that they’re written by AI.

Create headlines for your articles or subject lines for your emails. You can also toss in some keyword optimization here. For example, write a headline for this article that optimizes for the phrase “marketing technology.” (The headline of this article was written by ChatGPT. I asked for five options and picked the one I liked best.)

Create images to go with your articles. I use Midjourney for this, but I think I’m going to try Dall-E, where the process is said to be more iterative.

Translate an article into another language.

For your website

Content recommendations. I’ve wondered if readers should be able to exercise some control over this. For example, whether the recommendations should be based on what they actually read, or on what they say they want to read.

Manage a registration- or paywall. One of the big questions about metering is how many articles you allow someone to see before you ask for a registration, or for money. Rather than setting a single rule for the whole site, you could use AI to figure out the right rule for different segments, based on their behavior.

Improve your customer service chat bot responses. Most of the chatbots I’ve used are pretty poor. AI should be able to improve them significantly.

Use an LLM as the first step in an online discussion. Imagine a Reddit-like board where someone can ask a question, and AI gives the first answer. Your subject-matter experts, or other users, could then comment on the AI answer.

For audio, video, and events

Create a transcript of your podcast or webinar. The transcript should be edited, but AI can do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Create a timeline that shows what topics were discussed at what time index in the file. This is a great service to listeners. They know they can skip forward to the right time to hear the discussion they’re interested in.

Write a summary of the content of the recording. Since AI can make a transcript, it can also write a summary, suggest title, or even write an article version of the event.

I don’t think AI is ready to write unsupervised copy, and it’s certainly not right to create pretend authors for articles, the way Sports Illustrated seems to have done. If you choose to let AI write articles, you should be transparent about that.