I’ve worked in content marketing in one form or another for 15 years. In that time I’ve seen a lot. I’m always picking up and experimenting with new tools, workflows, ideas, and best practices. AI is the latest and greatest in the world of marketing, it seems. But how valuable is it really?
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Chapter selector
- What AI can do for content marketers
- How content marketers should leverage AI
- Why AI won’t save your content marketing
- How to truly excel in content marketing
- FAQ: AI and content marketing
What AI can do for content marketers
It’s honestly amazing and unnerving what AI can do these days. It can write entire articles, research niche topics, generate realistic images, create vibrant video, transcribe interviews and meetings, organize calendars – and that’s just scratching the surface.
TLDR – How AI can help content marketers
- Use it as a thought partner, not your idea factory. ChatGPT is great for sorting ideas, surfacing connections, or pressure-testing concepts – but true creativity still comes from you. It aggregates. You invent.
- Let it organize your chaos. Tools like NotebookLM shine when fed quality research. They can sift, summarize, and surface insights – especially from PDFs, links, and transcripts – as long as you guide the questions.
- Transcribe, then transform. Use Otter.ai or Riverside.fm to quickly turn audio into text. From there, ChatGPT or NotebookLM can help shape that into blogs, quotes, or article drafts.
- Write faster – but stay in your voice. AI can help scale your content output, but only if it sounds like you. Train ChatGPT on your style, set up a custom project, and rewrite dry or robotic content into something human.
- Prompts matter. The more specific your request, the better the output – whether you’re building a mind map, asking for a counter-argument, or turning a transcript into a TLDR (like this, right here!).
Here is where content marketers should use AI:
Brainstorming with ChatGPT
I’m actually hesitant to include this because I firmly believe we should not become overly reliant on AI for brainstorming. Brainstorming is one of the most critical stages of the creative process – and AI is ultimately reductive. I still think it’s important to exercise your brainstorming chops through hikes, creative writing, doing puzzles, talking to people, making mind maps, meditation, and whatever gets your brain soaring.
But AI can make sense as a sounding board or for organizing your ideas and thoughts. It can be effective as a conversational tool – allowing you to work through what might work well for a campaign, podcast, or article, or what might fall flat. But I urge against having AI do the heavy lifting.
AI is limited in it’s ability to get truly creative and think outside the box. It’s more an aggregation of everything that’s already out there – it can’t truly have original thoughts. The best it can do is help you find yours.
I’ve typically had good results with this using ChatGPT.
Brainstorming AI prompts for ChatGPT:
- How might this idea be perceived by others?
- How does X insight potentially connect to Y insight?
- Here are various assorted thoughts I have about XYZ. Please organize them.
- I am building B. I have A resources, ideas, etc. Build a mind map that connects A to B.
- Are there potential angles I’ve overlooked here?
- Give me a strong counter-argument to this idea.
Organizing research data with NotebookLM
This is one of the strongest use cases for AI – assuming you are feeding it the right information and asking the right questions. I personally prefer NotebookLM for this because you can feed it a variety of sources from PDFs and other documents to webpages and YouTube videos. And it does an excellent job citing the sources – down to the actual sentence in a PDF, for instance.
NotebookLM will suggest questions you can ask it as well, to get the most out of the information you’ve collected – but it can be a bit hit or miss sometimes. I often find the best way to use this is to have an idea about what you want to learn in mind already, gather the information you think will uncover the insights you’re seeking, and formulate your questions based on that.
Research-related AI prompts for NotebookLM:
- What do these different studies have in common?
- What does this body of research ultimately conclude?
- What are key takeaways that my core audience would benefit from?
- What are some statistics worth highlighting for people?
- Provide a concise, consolidated summary of information
- Where is this research lacking? What remains unanswered?
Transcribing audio with Otter.ai and Riverside.fm
Transcribing audio from meetings or interviews is another area where AI does extremely well – but it typically requires two tools: One AI tool to do the transcription and another AI tool to do any work you want done with that transcription.
I like to use Otter.ai or Riverside.fm for making the transcriptions. Both are extremely easy to use and, typically within minutes of uploading an audio or video file, you’ll have a very accurate transcript.
I usually save the transcript as a simple TXT file and then upload it to either ChatGPT or NotebookLM – depending on if I’m using it standalone (ChatGPT) or as part of a larger body of information (NotebookLM).
From there you can build full-fledged articles, white papers, and more based on the audio you’ve recorded. You can even build comprehensive in-depth articles from your podcasts and videos.
Transcript-based AI prompts for ChatGPT:
- Provide a concise, bulleted summary of this transcript.
- Attached is a transcript of XYZ. Write an article from it.
- What are some of the most engaging quotes from this interview?
Scale your writing with ChatGPT
This is another area where I am often torn on whether to actually involve AI. But the simple fact is that, today, if you don’t use AI at this stage of the process, you’re not going to be able to achieve the same output as your competitors. While you will always benefit more from quality of content vs. quantity, content output can still be an issue if you’re trying to get ahead of your competition.
I find the most important this is ensuring that whatever AI writes is in my voice. Luckily, this has become a lot easier. A trick I found that has worked well is to have ChatGPT analyze large amounts of my writing and provide a detailed analysis of it: Cadence, language, humor, punctuation, slang, intelligence, personality, and so on. I then ask ChatGPT to turn that information into a prompt that will allow it to replicate my own writing style.
Once I have this prompt, I like to create a project specifically for writing. The reason for this is that ChatGPT’s “projects” feature allows you to create foundational instructions that ChatGPT should always adhere to inside the project. Adding the aforementioned prompt here ensures that whatever it writes out will be in the voice you want. You can even use this to develop distinct author personas with their own personalities and writing quirks.
This is also where everything above kind of ties together. NotebookLM’s output is often quite dry. And articles written from transcripts may not be written in the voice you want. I like to use ChatGPT to rewrite NotebookLM or transcript text in my own voice.
Finally, enlisting the aid of ChatGPT is also an easy and effective way to write FAQs and TLDR lists – which search and AI engines heavily favor these days.
Writing AI prompts for ChatGPT:
- Below is text from NotebookLM. Create an article section from it on XYZ in my voice.
- Use the attached transcript text to write an article section about XYZ in my voice.
- Write a FAQ from the attached information.
- Create a TLDR list from the following text.
Why AI won’t save your content marketing
With everything I’ve said above, it might be easy to think that AI can do pretty much everything when it comes to content marketing. Hell, these days tools like AirOps allow you to create a fully automated workflow that, with just a brand kit and a keyword, can create a fully fleshed-out 10 page article complete with SERP analysis (via SEMrush) and deep research (via Perplexity).
It is truly shocking to see everything AI can do.
There is just one problem.
If you’re using AI from start to finish, all that deep research, all that SERP analysis, all the content that all your articles, podcasts, and videos are built on: It’s all been done before. It already exists on the web. And what’s worse: Everyone else is using AI the same way you are. And even worse than that: All that AI-built content – both theirs and yours – is going to start getting picked up by the same AI that built it, as well.
That’s like eating what you’ve just regurgitated.
This is a game of steeply and quickly diminishing returns.
TL;DR – Why AI won’t save your content marketing
- When everyone is using it, nothing stands out. AI pulls from existing content – and then recreates more of the same. You’re just remixing what’s already out there.
- It creates a feedback loop of sameness. AI starts training on AI-made content. That means your new content is built on recycled, regurgitated material.
- Originality dies fast. Fully AI-generated marketing becomes indistinguishable noise – and search engines will catch on.
How to truly excel in content marketing
But there is a very easy and simple solution to this: Create new things.
That means thinking outside of the box and using AI as little as possible. Collect and analyze first-party data to share meaningful statistics and actionable insights that no one else has. Craft actual stories featuring real people. Do the legwork on research, don’t regurgitate what already exists online. Create art, music, and writing from scratch.
This isn’t conjecture or a zealous call to a higher way of living. This is literally the content that Google and AI engines now favor: Real stories, exclusive insights, and things that can’t be found anywhere else.
You can develop the best outlines, put all the right keywords in the right places, and have a kick-ass JSON schema. But if it’s built on everything that everyone else has already done – and replicates what everyone else is doing now – it’s probably not going to take you to the top.
TLDR – How to actually excel in content marketing
- Google and AI engines reward originality. Focus on human perspectives and ideas.
- Use AI sparingly – if at all. Let it assist, not lead. Overreliance = recycled content.
- Dig into first-party data. Gather firsthand insights. Share takeaways no one has.
- Tell real stories. Feature real people, highlight lived experiences, share raw data.
- Do the research yourself. Go beyond surface-level summaries and AI blog loops.
- Make from scratch. Build your own stuff – don’t just remix what’s out there.
- Bottom line: The best-performing content isn’t just optimized – it’s original.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ): Using AI in Content Marketing
Q: What can AI actually do for content marketers?
A: A lot. It can write articles, research topics, generate visuals and video, transcribe audio, and even organize your workflow. Tools like ChatGPT, NotebookLM, Otter.ai, and Riverside.fm make these tasks fast and scalable.
Q: Should I use AI to brainstorm ideas?
A: Use it as a sounding board – not your primary source of creativity. It can help organize your thoughts, surface overlooked angles, and stress-test concepts. But it can’t think originally. That part’s still on you.
Q: What tools are best for organizing research?
A: NotebookLM excels at summarizing and connecting info across PDFs, webpages, and even YouTube videos – especially when you feed it quality sources and specific questions.
Q: What’s the best way to transcribe and use audio content?
A: Use Otter.ai or Riverside.fm for fast, accurate transcripts. Then plug the transcript into ChatGPT or NotebookLM to turn that content into blogs, articles, quotes, or summaries.
Q: Can AI write my content for me?
A: Technically yes. But if you let it do all the work, your content will sound robotic, repetitive, and generic. Train AI on your voice, set up a custom ChatGPT project, and use it to rewrite content in your tone.
Q: Are prompts really that important?
A: Absolutely. Great prompts unlock better AI responses. Ask specific, nuanced questions or instructions – like building mind maps, structuring summaries, or crafting article sections in your voice.
Q: What’s the problem with using AI for everything?
A: If everyone’s using AI, everything they make starts to look and sound the same. In a worst-case scenario (which we already have evidence of), AI not only regurgitates existing content, but is inadvertently trained on that regurgitated content. It’s a creative death spiral.
Q: So how do I actually stand out in content marketing?
A: Create new things. Gather original data. Share real stories. Build from scratch. Do the hard research. Prioritize quality over shortcuts. That’s what Google and AI ranking systems now reward most of all.
Q: Can AI help me stay competitive?
A: Yes – if it amplifies your originality, not replaces it. Use AI to support, organize, and speed up your process. But your unique perspective is still the most valuable asset in your content stack.