Editorial: Written by ChatGPT, illustrated by Midjourney: generative AI for content marketing
Risqo M. Wahid, Joel Mero, Paavo Ritala · Asia Pacific Journal of Marketing and Logistics · 2023
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new generation of AI technologies thatproduces new digital content based on user-inserted prompts (De Cremer et al., 2023).Via generative AI, users can simply tell the AI tool the type and nature of the outputs they want (e.g. a compelling email to potential customers, a summary of benefits of a product category or a sketch of a visual design), and the AI will generate the requested outputs.What is more, many of the generative AI tools are "conversational"-they allow the user to provide additional specifications and requests, based on which the output is further refined.Examples of generative AI applications include: (1) ChatGPT for writing texts (e.g.social media posts and website content), (2) Dall-E and Midjourney for creating realistic images and visual art, (3) Steve AI for producing videos and animations and (4) Boomy for making original music.These platforms have encountered great enthusiasm and record-breaking technology adaptation curves (e.g.within only one week of its launch, ChatGPT acquired more than a hundred million users, see Dowling and Lucey, 2023).The reasons for this enthusiasm are the wide-ranging accessibility of these platforms, user-friendly application interfaces, quick responses by the tools and users' perceived quality of the output.ChatGPT and other generative AI applications are all about content generation, and thus they are particularly valuable for content marketing.Content marketing can be generally defined as the identification, creation and dissemination of valuable and digitized content to engage customers, with the final goal of enhancing marketing performance (Hollebeek and Macky, 2019;Holliman and Rowley, 2014;Terho et al., 2022).To illustrate the value of generative AI in content creation, consider for example a business-to-business marketing software firm that wants to create content on Instagram.The firm can ask ChatGPT to write a caption with this prompt: "Write me a story about typical failures in online marketing and use the perspective of a small business owner."For the visual, the user may request Dall-E to create an image with the input of: "A picture in an abstract style of an unhappy business owner."Almost instantly, ChatGPT and Dall-E generate the outputs, and the user can further iterate with those until feasible content is created.It is clear that generative AI will change content marketing outcomes, given the efficiency, creativity and short production time involved in using these tools.Although promising for content marketers, scholars have argued that AI could also provide suboptimal or even harmful implications for them (De Bruyn et al., 2020), and more recently, about challenges with generative AI for content quality, validation and intellectual property, for instance (Dwivedi et al., 2023).It also remains unclear what are the implications of generative AI for individual marketing professionals and organizational practices in Editorial 1813 Ethics approval: This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.Therefore, no ethical approval or informed consent is needed.