Feature
The Gist
- Generative AI boom. Generative AI apps, like ChatGPT, have seen explosive growth and adoption in the marketing industry.
- AI challenges. Despite their powerful capabilities, generative AI apps require careful editing and fact-checking for quality content.
- Beneficial tools. Generative AI apps can simplify workflows, boost productivity and facilitate engaging content creation.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has been in the spotlight for the past year, and new apps that are based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology are being released each week. There are AI apps that create images from text, act as personal assistants, create marketing content, create videos from text, write blogs, create chatbots and much more. So many apps have been released that it’s challenging to know which ones are useful, especially for marketers. In this article, we are going to highlight the top 5 generative AI apps that marketers should know about.
What Is Generative AI?
Generative AI refers to a type of AI that is able to create new content, which can range from text, to images, to music, to videos and more. The key idea behind generative AI is that it's able to create something new, rather than just analyzing and making predictions based on existing data, which is what most other types of AI do.
The use and adoption of generative AI applications have exponentially grown in the past year, and a recent report from Statista predicted that the global market revenues of AI in marketing are expected to grow from $27.4 billion dollars in 2023 to $107.4 billion in 2028. The report also revealed that over 80% of industry leaders integrate some form of AI technology into their online marketing activities. In fact, 50% of respondents use generative AI for ad targeting, and others said their use of the technology included personalizing content, optimizing email send times and calculating conversion probability.
Generative AI models learn patterns in the data they are trained on, and then use those patterns to generate new content that is similar to the training data. These models can often generate incredibly impressive results, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between content that is generated by AI and content that is created by a human.
It’s important to note that although it appears that generative AI understands the content it generates, it is actually just building on the data that it has been trained on. It has no actual understanding of any of the topics it discusses, but rather makes the best guess about each word that should follow the last.
Generative AI such as ChatGPT uses what can be thought of as an "instructive supervised fine-tuning" approach to training. This involves creating a dataset in which two or more model responses are ranked based on quality. These models are then trained to compete against each other, with the goal of generating better responses. This process can also be described as an adversarial setup, as the models "argue" with each other to improve their performance. This process is designed to encourage the model to generate more accurate and contextually appropriate responses.
Related Article: How to Pick the Right Flavor of Generative AI
ChatGPT Plus
One cannot consider the discussion of generative AI applications without looking at the original generative AI app, ChatGPT. The free version uses GPT-3.5, and the paid version, ChatGPT Plus, is able to use both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. Plus users are also able to use ChatGPT plugins, as well as a Code Interpreter. A Bing search tool was available until recently but has been temporarily disabled.
Thi Thumasathit, VP of marketing at Helix, a generative AI-based customer success platform, told CMSWire that the company uses the Code Interpreter functionality of ChatGPT because it is able to write and execute Python code, work with file uploads and analyze customer surveys. "We just need to upload a CSV file of survey results, and then we can use conversation prompts like, 'Generate a histogram for this question,' or even more vague prompts like, 'Show me insights for this customer segment,'" said Thumasathit. "It's a massive time saver."
ChatGPT is able to create marketing copy, blog posts, social media posts, advertising copy, product descriptions and practically any appropriate content that a user requests. The key to using it to create quality content lies in the use of prompts. Prompt engineering, as it is referred to, is the art of crafting a prompt that will result in ChatGPT (and most generative AI applications) generating the exact content the user is interested in.
As with any generative AI application, ChatGPT tends to “hallucinate” or make information up once in a while. This occurs when the AI generates new data or content that it wasn't explicitly trained on. This behavior is based on the underlying principle of generative AI, which involves learning the distribution and patterns within a given dataset and then producing new, similar data.
The content that is created by generative AI applications always requires editing, fact-checking and due diligence in order to obtain quality content. Lauren Walter, search and content director at Online Optimism, a digital marketing and design agency, told CMSWire that as marketers, we cannot simply take what we are given by AI — we have to complete a thorough editing process and inject personalization and originality into the writing.
A ChatGPT Plus subscription is $20 per month and provides users with early access to new features, as well as prioritized usage access. It does not include premium access to the GPT4 API, however, as that is billed separately based on usage.
Related Article: ChatGPT: What You Need to Know
Grammarly Premium
Many people use Grammarly to check the grammar, punctuation and spelling of the content they produce. It can be integrated with most of the popular writing and editing programs, as well as the majority of applications that include writing functionality, such as Gmail, chat apps and forms on web pages. Grammarly works by making suggestions that allow the user to make the content more easily understandable, concise or grammatically correct. Additionally, Grammarly can make suggestions that change the tone of the content.
Tom Golubovich, head of marketing at Ninja Transfers, a custom print design service provider, told CMSWire that his all-time favorite generative AI app is Grammarly, which he said never fails to deliver for writing, generating and optimizing marketing content. "Writing assistants have been around for a while now, and though this type of generative AI technology is not new, many marketers fail to utilize its capabilities," said Golubovich. "Grammarly is one of those apps that integrate seamlessly with your other marketing apps and activities, and it's an app that will always make your life better and your job easier as a marketer."
GrammarlyGO can generate content with a tone that is casual, creative or academic, but as with any generative AI application, any content it generates should be fact-checked for accuracy.
Subscriptions to Grammarly range from free (for basic features) to $12 per month for Premium, and $15 per month (per team member) for Business, both of which begin with a 7-day free trial. A Grammarly desktop application is available, as well as a browser extension and an iOS app.
Jasper AI
Jasper.ai is a generative AI tool that was specifically designed with marketers in mind. It can be used to create product descriptions, blog posts, company profiles, advertising copy and social media posts.
Features of Jasper include text and image AI generation, integration with Grammarly, revision history, a plagiarism checker, brand voice customization, auto-save, document sharing, and multi-user logins.
Additionally, it includes templates for the creation or enhancement of various types of content. For instance, using a marketing template, when asked to improve the paragraph above for clarity, it changed it to:
“Jasper offers a range of notable features. These include AI generation for both text and images, seamless integration with Grammarly, revision history tracking, a plagiarism checker, customization of brand voice, automatic saving, document sharing capabilities, and support for multiple user logins.”
Subscriptions start at $39 per month for individuals, and $99 per month for teams, and begin with a 7-day free trial.
YouPro
You.com is essentially an AI chatbot for web search that is similar to Bing chat mode for search. You.com’s responses are created using a version of the generative AI model GPT-3. Interestingly, You.com was founded by Richard Socher, one of the top AI research scientists and the former chief scientist at Salesforce.
Much like ChatGPT, You.com is also able to generate essays, blogs, poetry and presentations, as well as to be a conversational AI assistant or chatbot. It includes limited access to YouWrite, a generative AI bot, and YouImagine, an image-creation tool.
A subscription to the premium version, YouPro, costs $9.99 per month, and provides subscribers with unlimited access to YouWrite (which uses GPT-4) and YouImagine (which uses Stable Diffusion XL), as well as additional functionality such as YouCode, which is a code interpreter.
Phrasee
Phrasee is billed as “generative AI for enterprise marketers” and includes features and functionality that make it “best of breed” for marketers and brands. It uses generative AI to create marketing copy for use throughout the entire customer journey.
The platform enables marketers to test and optimize content for better performance, conversions and ROI. It provides insights and integrations that push the AI-generated content into a brand’s existing martech stack. Phrasee features brand controls, which are designed to protect and amplify a brand’s unique tone and voice through its generated content and to create and predict the "best-performing" content based on data. It also includes automation functionality, reporting and language insights.
The pricing for Phrasee is much higher than any of the other AI apps that have been discussed here. Subscriptions start at $500 per month for its Generate platform, and “flexible” pricing for Generate plus Optimize, which includes the ability to integrate with major ESPs and DXPs, as well as language insights and performance data reporting, enterprise-level security and dedicated customer support.
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Final Thoughts on Generative AI Apps
Generative AI apps, such as ChatGPT, Grammarly Premium, Jasper AI, YouPro and Phrasee, offer marketers diverse and unique capabilities for content creation. While choosing the most useful and appropriate app can be challenging, generative AI can simplify workflows and boost productivity. Marketers must remember that generative AI is far from perfect, so it's always essential to edit and perform fact-checking to ensure high-quality content. By effectively using generative AI along with prompt engineering, marketers can efficiently create engaging marketing content.
