5 Reasons Not to Use Generative AI For Thought Leadership Content

While everyone extols the promises of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) at drafting and enhancing copy, I will push back—especially for writing thought leadership content. I’m not a Luddite. Last year, as tech companies rushed their chatbots to market, I spent several months testing whether Chat GPT, Claude, and Gemini could help me brainstorm ideas and automate my writing process. At first, I felt I’d found the perfect assistant—one that would do research, draft outlines, and improve my sentence structure as needed. 

The more I played with GenAI, however, the more my faith in this technological advancement waned. While a chatbot serves as a competent grammarian, I don’t trust it as a storyteller. While it does a decent job of feeding me data, it often takes more time to fact-check that information than to do the research myself. 

What concerns me most about GenAI is not the chatbot’s competence but what it will do to my own. After just a few months of using chatbots, I felt I was becoming a lazier thinker and writer. If I couldn’t develop a strategy or phrase fast enough, I turned to the chatbot, abdicating my authority to a machine. Working with GenAI was unsatisfying after the novelty wore off, and I began feeling less connected to my work. Less authentic. 

The Limitations of Generative AI

My job is to develop and write content that promotes my clients as thought leaders. I work to understand and communicate their unique perspectives, innovative insights, knowledge, and values.

Chatbots are trained on published data—other people’s opinions and ideas. Their output is never unique.

While GenAI is here to stay and may make positive contributions to marketing and communications, I don’t believe it can replace a thinking, sentient human writer. If we rely on chatbots to do our thinking for us, they may dumb us all down.

In fact, that is already happening. A recent Japanese study on the effect of using GenAI tools on critical thinking concluded that, “while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification, from problem-solving to AI response integration, and from task execution to task stewardship.” 

We can’t stop the use of GenAI. However, when it comes to thought leadership, we can refuse to replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence.  Here are five convincing reasons to do the thinking yourself.

1. Chatbots do not produce original ideas.

Chatbots work from a knowledge base derived from massive amounts of publicly available text and code found on websites, books, articles, and databases. They can analyze data on specific subjects and summarize it. While they hold onto more data than most humans can learn and/or retain, their insights aren’t original. They can’t think or form opinions.

By definition, thought leaders are not followers. They are critical thinkers who develop their insights and unique points of view through experience, training, and deep knowledge. 

I asked Google’s Gemini, “Can you produce original ideas?” It responded, “I can process information and respond in creative ways. Essentially, I can recombine information in new and interesting ways to create something novel.” 

GenAI is a follower. When you give it a prompt, you get a creative regurgitation of existing data. Without doing the research yourself, you have no guarantee that the response you get from a chatbot is relevant or accurate. 

Chatbots can scan and make conclusions from data. However, they can’t distinguish what data within their huge training base is most relevant to our queries. Additionally, they can’t identify the societal or cultural biases the data contains. The bias in their responses may run counter to your or your organization’s values.

By digging down and asking continuous questions about the conclusions a chatbot has made, you may come closer to material you can use to supplement articles, e-books, or white papers. Doing so may save you time if you can confirm that the sources are reliable. But you still need an accomplished writer to integrate that data with your thought leaders’ insights. When you trust a chatbot too much, you risk developing poor-quality content that may prove useless to your audience, compromise the trust you’ve built, and weaken your brand.

2. Chatbot output can be incomplete, misleading, or even false.

While rapid advances are being made in the size of chatbot memories, their context windows can limit the quality and accuracy of the copy they generate.

When a chatbot is trained, it learns to understand and generate text based on sequences of tokens (words or parts of words) up to a certain maximum length—its context window. The chatbot only retains what fits within this window. As the window expands, older interactions (both prompts and responses) will be erased as new ones are added. 

Conversing with a chatbot for too long is like talking with an old person with short-term memory loss who forgets what you’ve been talking about a few minutes into the conversation. At a certain point, a chatbot will also lose track of earlier context so that its later responses have no relation to your original conversation.

In addition to memory limitations, chatbots have been known to have hallucinations: information that appears plausible but is incorrect or fabricated. That’s because they are trained to recognize patterns in their training data and predict what words should come next based on those observed patterns. The core foundation of AI is mathematical, not human reasoning. Sometimes, a chatbot will let you know it’s unsure of an answer, but when it encounters uncertainty, it may make up an answer that it deems plausible without letting you know it’s a fabrication.

3. GenAI is based on the most likely, not the latest, data. 

AI chatbots are trained on data that may be outdated. This is a critical issue when writing scientific, medical, and healthcare content since chatbots may ignore the most recent research completely. Chatbots base their responses on the volume rather than the quality of data they’re trained on. The chatbot may deem a single breakthrough study as too insignificant to mention, even though the new study makes all previous research obsolete.

When queried, ChatGPT responded that it “was trained on a wide range of publicly available information up until October 2023.” Google’s Gemini model is continually being updated and improved, referring to Google Search for information. We know that search engines can’t always filter fiction from fact. Anthropic’s Claude was last updated in April 2024 and notes, “This means that I aim to provide accurate responses based on information known up until that time. However, I want to be upfront that I can’t make any absolute claims about the exact contents or details of my training data.”

It’s nice that these programs attempt honesty, but you can’t count on it. At the end of the AI synopsis that now populates the top of Google searches, it notes, “Generative AI is experimental.”

4. AI-generated copy can lack accurate sourcing

You can ask your chatbot to provide sourcing, but sometimes those citations link to a 404 error or a webpage that is completely irrelevant. If you can’t discover the source of specific information in AI-generated responses, you have to look for citations yourself to authenticate the response. 

In doing your own research, you may discover there is more interesting or relevant information available. You may also find that whatever insights the chatbot has provided were directly lifted from a competitor and reordered or rewritten. If you were to use that output, it would diminish your authority as a thought leader. 

If you rely on AI to do initial research, you should always have a professional fact-check it to ensure its accuracy. Make sure you work from the most valuable data currently available for your thought leadership assets. 

5. AI does not have a conscience

One of the key characteristics of a true thought leader is the set of values that influence their point of view. GenAI does not have a conscience. It also does not have empathy or a genuine sense of humor or irony—critical elements in good thought leadership content.

When I asked Claude the subjective question, “What’s it like to be you?” Claude replied, “As an artificial intelligence, it’s difficult for me to fully capture the nature of my own experience and ‘consciousness’ in a way that would make complete sense to humans. I don’t have subjective experiences quite like a human does. I’m an advanced language model that can engage in intelligent conversation, but under the hood, I’m doing complex pattern matching and text generation, not experiencing an inner mental life. I don’t have sensations, emotions, or a unified subjective experience in the way humans do.”

That doesn’t mean a chatbot won’t attempt to approximate the emotions it’s picked up from its training model. Don’t let it seduce you. For thought leadership content to be authentic, it has to come directly from a human source. 

In praise of human writers

GenAI is a great tool for writers because it can help jumpstart a project when you’re looking at a blank page and catch all your misplaced commas. But, they can’t replace the questioning, learning, and imaginative expression that goes into creating a piece of prose. 

As AI evolves and humans rely more on it to do their reading, math equations, and housework, we may hit a point where writers become eccentric characters of the past. But I hate to imagine a time when all humankind has abdicated its humanity to the machine. (Remember Hal in “2001 Space Odyssey”? That didn’t go well for the humans.)

Fortunately, we still have human thought leaders who can drive innovation and help organizations and societies maintain core values. For now, we also have writers—the thought leaders themselves or ghostwriters— with the talent and skills to communicate these unique insights to receptive audiences. Only humans have the consciousness to combine personal experience, expertise, and judgment and weave it into a unique and compelling read. I hope that never changes.

The post Do You Think? appeared first on Lisa Stockwell.

If you want your healthcare content to be understood and effective, make it easy to read. Fascinating facts, great stories and persuasive copywriting mean nothing if your patients or business prospects can’t or won’t take the time to read them. Even in the best of times, it takes skill to capture the attention of a distracted audience. During a pandemic, it is even more challenging.

Don’t Overestimate the Health Literacy Level of Your Audience

It may come as no surprise that U.S. adults have a low health literacy rate — their ability to access, understand and process health information. In 2003, when health literacy was last assessed, only 12 percent of U.S. adults over the age of 16 performed at the highest literacy proficiency level. What is surprising is that only 24 percent with bachelor’s degrees and 33 percent of those with advanced degrees met that bar.

Meet your audience at their reading level

The average U.S. adult reads at or below the 8^th grade level. That means that if you write your patient education pamphlets, health and wellness websites, brochures, and even sales sheets at a high school or college reading level, you’re going to lose the majority of your readers. Keep your content between a 7th and 8th grader reading level to ensure the widest audience.

Don’t worry that your content won’t be sophisticated enough for scientists, specialists and corporate executives with advanced degrees. They also appreciate simplicity. With busy days and multiple deadlines, they often don’t have the mental energy to absorb lengthy, complex and abstract prose.

Keep your readers engaged

Writing content that is simple, interesting, and persuasive takes skill. It’s a constant exercise in paring down, shortening sentences, and replacing complex words with simpler ones. Writing to an elementary reading level does not mean your writing has to be elementary. It will not insult a professional’s intelligence or keep you from being able to cover everything you need to communicate. When you do it right, your copy isn’t boring. It pulls the reader in.

Take a lead from print journals like The New York Times to ensure you’re getting your message across to the professionals you want to address. They write to a 6th to 7th grade level. Even better, the New Yorker and Economist shoot for a 5th grade level.

To write content that gets read, understood and even shared, consider the following tips:

• Start with what you want to say and then pare it down by as much as 50%.
• Shoot for 20 to 25 words per sentence, varying sentence length for interest.
• Keep your average character per word count around 5.
• Make all verbs active, not passive. (i.e. change “Medication should be taken…” to “take this medication…”)
• Eliminate unnecessary adverbs.
• Use a readability rating tool to test your content.

Run your content through a readability rating tool

Happily there are many good online tools for measuring readability. Different tools use different measuring scales. Flesch-Kincaid is the most popular scale used, with a good readability score being 60 or over. The options I find the most useful are:

• Microsoft Office Word: If you use Word, you can set preferences to provide Readability scores after it finishes checking spelling and grammar. It provides average words per sentence, Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and tells you the percentage of passive sentences in your copy.
• Readable: This page allows you to test the readability of your text and see where it can be improved. In addition to this free calculator, Readable offers different plans, starting at $4/month for a single user. Other plans offer additional editing features.
• WebFX:  This free readability test tool lets you test a block of text or text from a website url. It provides scores from several measuring scales, text statistics and visual indicator bars that indicate if your copy is good to go.
• Hemingway App: This $19.99 app not only gives you your scores but also helps improve readability by suggesting edits to words and phrases.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio.

If you feel like your content is getting ignored, it may be time to rework it for a broader audience. If you’d like help, I work with healthcare companies to develop content that builds awareness and generates leads. Contact me for a free 15 minute consultation.

The post When it Comes to Healthcare Content, Readability Matters appeared first on Lisa Stockwell.

How to stay constructive when working remotely

Five months into sheltering in place and you may be spending 90% of your time at home. Your interaction with colleagues has gone 2D. Your boss has cut back your budget. And you can’t make plans to travel anywhere, meet with colleagues or socialize without wondering if it will be safe.   

With new distractions, stress and the uncertainty of how long this will last, it may be harder to start each day with a smile. Have you slowed down your pace? Are you feeling only half as productive as you used to be? Are you feeling like the future is completely out of your control?  

Remote work has its advantages. But providing structure isn’t one of them.

As someone who has worked from a home office for several decades, I have developed various practices that help me stay focused and enjoy a more constructive day.  Maybe a few of these will work for you.

Be grateful

The truth is, as horrible as things get, there is always something to be grateful for. Focusing on one good thing in your life before you get up each morning can set the tone for the rest of the day. This isn’t just magical thinking. Research has proven that gratitude not only improves your psychological and physical health, but it also improves your self-esteem.

Instead of letting stress and frustration take you down the rabbit hole, focus on all the resources and skills you have to work with. It may be your creativity or ability to analyze the marketplace. It may be a great webinar or podcast you learned something new from. You can also be grateful for the people in your life — a colleague who helped you finish a project or a child who made you laugh.

Get out of your pajamas!

My grandmother insisted that no matter how you feel, you should get dressed every morning as soon as you get out of bed. For almost every day of her 99 years, she followed her own advice. Through the 1919 pandemic when she wasn’t allowed to leave her college dormitory. Through the Great Depression and two World Wars. Through the death of her son, her husband, all three of her sisters and all of her close friends. Every single day, she was up by 8 and dressed. No matter what time I visited her, she was always put together in some version of a blouse, fitted skirt and matching sweater. 

Loungewear represented inertia to my grandmother. It was no surprise that when she died, she went in her sleep, dressed in her nightgown.

I’m definitely more of a sloth than my grandmother, but every time I contemplate whether to head back to bed and work in my bathrobe, I remember her admonition to get dressed and seize the day. You don’t have to get fancy. Sweats will do. But don’t forget to change into a decent shirt if you have to Zoom.

Fine tune your schedule

It’s fairly common to add meetings to your calendar and leave the rest of the time slots blank, figuring you’ll fit projects in as they come up.

You can be more productive if you move all your to-dos onto your calendar. To-do lists on their own are easy to ignore. And a calendar with empty time slots makes it easy to procrastinate on more important projects, thinking you have time to spare.  

Consider using a whiteboard to plan your week. Take time on Friday afternoon or Sunday evening to fill it out. Schedule your large tasks first, such as projects with tight deadlines. Then add in personal appointments, workouts and activities that are important to your health and sanity.

Since even the best plans are affected by changes or delays, revisit your calendar every evening and fine tune it for the next day. Add in even small tasks that take under 10  minutes — like making a call to a banker or sending out a follow-up email to a client.

Always set your calendar to send alerts several minutes before you need to start the next scheduled activity.

Get an accountability partner

We all have projects we put off because they have no deadlines. Marketing calls, proposals, marketing content for the next quarter. They may not be critical this week, but they also can’t be ignored. A great way to get them done is to find an accountability partner (or two or three). Set a particular time on particular days of the week to work on just those tasks. Check in by text or a messaging platform like Slack. Confirm what you are committing to work on. Set a timer for 50 to 60 minutes and go!

Check in at the end of the time period to report what you accomplished. You’ll be amazed how much you can get done when you have someone holding you accountable.

Take a walk

Schedule a walk every day. Put it in your calendar. It’s not only good exercise, but it helps you let go of worries and refresh your mind and attitude. You may find that whenever you are stuck with a work or personal problem, opening the door and taking a few laps around the neighborhood provides the answer.

If you’re lucky to have dogs, they’ll force you to go out. If not, walk whenever you’re losing steam or feel that the day is getting you down.

Ask for help

This pandemic isn’t going to magically disappear. It’s going to keep affecting your life and work for some time. Having practices that help you feel in control gives you the best chance of doing well.

And on those days when you just can’t get it together, remember you’re not alone. One of the best strategies for staying sane while working remotely is to maintain a pool of colleagues you can reach out to for help. The one certain thing about this pandemic is that we’re all suffering through it together. And there will be days when each of us needs a helping hand.

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Let your audience know your business is still going strong

It’s hard to get anyone’s attention in the best of times. During this pandemic, it may feel impossible. But as healthcare spending picks up, you can’t afford to sit on the sidelines waiting for a better time to engage. This is the right time to offer solutions that can help your healthcare customers improve their efficiencies — and the efficiency of the industry as a whole — in a post-COVID-19 world.

If your clients have temporarily curbed their spending, their purchase decisions may be more considered going forward. Prospects may pay more attention to the quality of your relationships. As you get back in contact, you need to assure your audience that you understand their fears and frustrations and are there for them with the products and services they need when they are ready to invest.

The insights below may help guide your content marketing process.

Be sure of your audience

“Don’t push people to where you want to be; meet them where they are.” – Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP Marketing, HubSpot

Is your audience the same as it was six months ago? Do the services or products you offer still solve the challenges your audience is dealing with now? Given changes in the market, you may have to rethink your audience or the benefits you can offer them. If you’ve developed personas for your content marketing program, review each one to make sure they’re still relevant. If not, create new ones.

Provide empathy and support

There has never been a more important time to demonstrate you care. After a period of uncertainty, everyone is grasping for a sense of safety and control. Use your communications to empower your audience with ideas, information, or products that can help them deal with the pandemic. You can launch an email campaign or post regularly on social media. Offer ideas relevant to your products or services, such as safety tips for different situations and locations, nutrition plans to boost immune systems, or positive news to boost morale. Or develop a white paper that provides policy ideas, coping strategies, or reports based on your own research.

Meet people where they are

If you have an essential product or service that meets current needs, offer it, don’t sell it. Your goal should be to let people know what you have and where they can get it. This is not a great time to convince someone to buy something they don’t understand or know how to use. Provide sales sheets and web pages that explain features in clear terms and answer specific questions. Demonstrate through testimonials or case studies how the product or service is helping businesses like theirs. Use CTAs that ask questions rather than demand actions so you can initiate conversations.

Offer a discount

At a time when so many people are struggling financially, you can build a reputation for caring by offering services or products at a discount. Just make sure to communicate that you’re offering the same high quality at a more affordable cost that reflects current economic conditions.

Entertain

A lot of people are bored or stressed from working at home. If this sounds like your audience, offer links to great videos, a challenging crossword puzzle, or an app you think is incredible. Be remembered as the organization that kept them sane through difficult times.

Educate

Many people have more time to learn new things. If they’ve already binge watched everything of interest on Netflix and Hulu, they may be ready to take on a more complex report, guide, ebook, white paper, or webinar that will help them advance their careers or improve their physical or mental health.

Be consistent

There is no way to predict when we’re going to put Covid-19 behind us. But one thing you can predict is that if you stop marketing consistently, you may be without a business to market.

If you’ve cut your budget or run out of new ideas for content, go back through everything you’ve produced to see what you can repurpose. Revise content for a revised reality: A white paper can become a series of one-sheets, blog posts or emails. A collection of case studies can turn into a long article. A sales sheet can serve as the basis for an instructional ebook.

Keep the content rolling. And if you need help, reach out. If I’m not a good fit for your project, I’ll be happy to refer you to other content marketers who can do the job.

Photo by Anna Shvets

The post Stay Engaged appeared first on Lisa Stockwell.

How to Apply a Dog Trainer’s Tips to Gain Trust and Attention

The novel coronavirus hasn’t just affected the way we live our lives. It’s affected the way we communicate. With everyone’s nerves frayed and their hopes and dreams on hold, our audiences have changed. People may not be as receptive to the messages that once elicited enthusiasm. They may be skeptical of claims that promise to improve their lives. They may be too distracted to pay any attention at all.

As marketers and communicators, we can’t assume that the audiences we spoke to before March 2020 are the same today. We need to redefine our audiences and then reintroduce ourselves. For everyone but the most loyal followers, we need to re-earn respect and trust.   

So, how do we do that?

5 tips we can learn from dogs

To find some answers, I turned to my dogs. They are the ones who’ve seen me through this crisis, at my side through thick and thin, day and night for the past eight weeks. No matter what my mood or what mistakes I’ve made (like forgetting to fill the water bowl or take them on a morning walk), they continue to wag their tails and trust me to be here for them.

That got me thinking about dog trainers and how they establish trust with anxious dogs. I wasn’t surprised to discover that the tactics they use for dogs work just as well when it comes to communicating with humans in a crisis.

So, with thanks to Cesar Milan, I have amended his training insights for my colleagues in marketing communications.  

1. Stay calm: You should never approach a new dog with excited energy. It can result in a flight or fight reaction or an unwelcome response. You don’t, for instance, want to be jumped on and knocked over. In today’s wary environment, people are just as likely to be unresponsive or hostile to an overly enthusiastic pitch. If your products or services are essential, they will almost sell themselves. (If not, this is a good time to take a break or reinvent your business for the current times.)  Your best action is to introduce or reintroduce your brand and regularly send gentle reminders that your services or products are available to meet their needs.
2. Respect their space: Cesar recommends “no touch, no talk, no eye contact” when it comes to working with anxious dogs. Well, this tip won’t be hard to enact, since we’re all practicing social distancing anyway. But this is also a reminder to keep your messages simple and brief, respecting the fact that everyone is already overwhelmed and can’t focus on complex messages. If you have a lengthier presentation or piece of content you want to share, start by presenting a brief overview and let your audience request more. (This gives you a great way to keep the conversation going.)
3. Get on their level: With dogs, you want to get on their level, making sure that your body language is non-confrontational. With people, you want to get on their level too. Do that by demonstrating empathy. Let them know you understand how they feel. Address their concerns or pain with communications that explain how your solutions are effective and reliable—showing more than telling how they work.
4. Let them come to you: According to Cesar, a dog will let you know if he or she trusts you by sniffing and/or licking your hands and staying calmly in place. You can assume that if the dog turns away, she isn’t interested. You’re not going to buy respect by running after her. It’s the same with anxious business prospects (or patients in the healthcare industry). For the immediate future, you’re unlikely to make a convert through aggressive pitches. Just keep sending those gentle reminders with valuable insights, articles or newsletters and wait for them to come to you.
5. Go for a walk: Walking a new dog helps you earn trust as your dog learns how well you direct and protect her. In the human world, when prospects demo your products or begin working with you, they quickly form opinions about the quality you provide. You earn trust and build your reputation when your message matches the quality and effectiveness of your products or services.

That final tip — walking — is as critical for our mental health right now as it is for marketing. I find that going for a walk in the middle or end of the day clears my head and opens space for creative ideas to start flowing. (It’s even better when you have a dog to walk with!) So, don’t just do it metaphorically. Get out and get some fresh air! And when you get home, please remember to wash your hands. 🙂

For some great examples of how healthcare organizations are creating connections and building trust with their audiences, download a free copy of:

 9 Examples of Empathy in Healthcare Content Marketing.

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