How I use ChatGPT and Midjourney in content creation

ChatGPT and Midjourney are useful tools that can make your content creation more efficient

Image creation

I write an article most weekdays, and it’s nice to have an image to go along with the article. It’s an interesting exercise because you have to convert the concept into something visual.

For example, I was writing about people using AI agents. How do you make that into a picture? The reality would probably be somebody talking into a headset, but that would just look like a phone call.

To make it seem like an AI agent, I created an image of someone speaking to a small robot.

Sometimes that process of converting the text into an image can give you ideas for the article.

An example here is my article on “fine lines” in business. What does that look like? I opted for a hiker on a narrow path with a steep drop on each side. That reinforces the idea of the potential peril of straying from the middle way.

I use Midjourney for most of my images, and I’m mostly satisfied with it. Sometimes it’s hard to convince it to do what I like, but usually it works pretty well.

To get summaries

I think it’s a good service to the reader to give a brief description of an article at the top. Some studies have shown that this increases engagement with an article, which is a little counter-intuitive. You might expect that some people would think “Ah, the summary is all I needed, thanks.” But I think that’s outweighed by the number of people who aren’t sold by the title, and need a little more.

In any event, I ask ChatGPT to write a 30 or so word summary of an article. I almost never use that summary verbatim, but it helps with the process and saves me some time.

To make sure I didn’t miss something important

An article idea is often a kind of generalization of a particular situation. The particular situation might be one magazine that, after a lengthy absence, went back into print. The more general idea is how print might or might not fit in the modern mix.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past the specifics of the particulars, so when I write an article like that I’ll upload it to ChatGPT and ask what topics I might have missed.

By the way, uploading content to ChatGPT means that it can use that content to train its circuits and so on, so you need to be careful with that one.

To get ideas

I write a lot, and I usually don’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. Sometimes I do, and in those cases I might upload a series of articles and ask ChatGPT what other topics would fit in the general theme of what I’ve written before.

The results aren’t great, honestly, but they can be helpful and they can give me a spark of an idea that I can pursue further.

In a way, it’s like using ChatGPT the way you’d use a thesaurus. A sentence might not seem quite right. You can upload the sentence, tell ChatGPT what doesn’t seem quite right, and it can give alternatives.

That’s where ChatGPT excels, because it is a large language model, after all.

To create an outline

If I have to give a presentation, or create a longer chunk of content, I’ll start by listing everything I can think of that’s relevant to that topic. I’ll work on that for a while, but then comes the hard task of putting it in order. ChatGPT does a decent job at that.

For example, let’s say I want to do a presentation on digital marketing. I can upload all the articles I’ve written on digital marketing and ask ChatGPT to create a table of contents.

I don’t let ChatGPT write for me, but I do let it help with organizing, summarizing, and finding gaps.

Other ideas

There are a lot of other ways to use AI that don’t apply to what I do. I’ll list a few of them here in case they spark some ideas on your end.

• Create a transcript, summary, outline, or article from a recording.
• Optimize content for SEO.
• Personalize content on the fly based on reader preferences, demographics, or behavior. (I’d be careful with that one, but it’s worth thinking about.)
• Translate your content into another language.
• Use data on content consumption to come up with new content ideas.

If you have a minute, drop me a line and tell me how you use AI in your business.