Editor’s Note: It’s Not Just an “Easy Button”

As an editor and a writer, it is hard not to feel threatened by AI content generation. After all, why hire a writer or an editor when you can simply plug your product specs or LinkedIn profile into Claude or ChatGPT, and – voilà – it spits out a piece of real content!

Well, let me be the first to tell you: I’m not all that worried.

This issue features peer-submitted Innovators who are truly powering our industry to new heights. I commend them all. Here comes the “but” – most of those peers simply popped their nominee’s LinkedIn profile into ChatGPT and let it spit out some content.   

To a seasoned editor, it was brutally transparent. If I have to read one more profile that begins with the words “In today’s ever-evolving security landscape,” my eyes might just melt out of my head. It sticks out just as badly as a person with seven fingers in an AI-generated video.  

I really don’t blame those looking for a fast and easy (and thought-free) way to write a profile, especially for people not as inclined to writing as I am. That said, a little personalization goes a long way. 

Search LinkedIn for the phrase above, and you will undoubtedly find tons of examples of people trying to do ChatGPT-generated marketing, thought leadership, advertising, social posts, and many other means of content creation.

While I was at the Electronic Security Expo (ESX) in June, I had the chance to sit down with industry marketing guru David Morgan, who has run across his fair share of folks who have turned to generative AI to take care of all things marketing.

“We all know that AI has changed everything, but here’s a little hint – AI is not meant to be the easy button to ‘do a blog post’ on this or that,” Morgan told me. “You can see these things from a mile away, and it is a turnoff for the end-user.”

The end-user, in this case, is us – the very people reading that blog post.

So, how do you get around this obstacle? According to Morgan, it is all about how you query generative AI to deliver the content you want. He advocates for the “CRIT framework,”  which is a generative AI prompting system. It stands for Context, Role, Interview, Task, and the idea is to provide it with each of these items to generate more customized (ie, non-cookie-cutter) content. But even then, it will take a lot of queries and a lot of editing to make it read and sound human.

So allow me to conclude with another of ChatGPT’s greatest hits: For these reasons, you should take a closer look at how you use AI to generate content, and adjust where necessary.