I wrote about ChatGPT and marketing in 2023. Here is what I got right, and what I missed.
In early 2023 I asked whether ChatGPT would harm or help marketing. Three years on, here is what that post got right, what it underestimated, and how it changed the way I work.
In March 2023, a few weeks after ChatGPT showed up in everyone’s feed, I wrote a post asking a simple question: would this thing harm or help marketing?
I re-read it recently. Some of it holds up better than I expected. Some of it reads like a person squinting at the future through a keyhole. Both are useful, so here is the honest scorecard.
What I got right
That the tool itself is neutral. I argued back then that ChatGPT would not help or harm marketing on its own, that the outcome depended entirely on how people used it. Three years of watching that play out has only made me more sure. The teams that used it to think got sharper. The teams that used it to mass-produce got buried.
That it would flood the internet with sameness. I warned that using ChatGPT to churn out quick content would drown the web in duplicates. That happened, and faster than I thought. The open web filled up with competent, forgettable, interchangeable posts. The irony is that when everyone can generate passable content instantly, passable content becomes worthless. Scarcity moved to point of view, taste, and proof.
That AI could break the deal content marketers depend on. This was the point I am most glad I made. I wrote that if AI started answering questions directly, in place of a search results page, it could hurt content marketers by cutting off the referral traffic and the ad revenue that traffic pays for. I have since watched exactly that arrive. AI Overviews now sit above the links and answer the question on the page, and the organic clicks that a lot of content strategies quietly rely on erode underneath them. I saw the threat. I did not see how quickly it would stop being a threat and start being a Tuesday.
What I missed
How fast the limitations would fall. Most of my 2023 post was a list of things ChatGPT could not do well. It pulled from other sources instead of doing original research. Its knowledge stopped at 2021. It contradicted itself. I ran a translation test where the quality decayed with each pass and once switched languages entirely. All of that was true then. Almost none of it is true now. The models got current, got consistent, got far more reliable, and got a lot better at the exact tasks I had catalogued as weaknesses. Betting against the trend line was the mistake.
That “assistant” was too small a word. I framed the tool the way most people did in 2023: a helper for ideation and first drafts, with a human staying responsible for the real work. That framing was safe, and it aged into being the least interesting part of the post. Treating AI as a faster typewriter was the obvious use, so it was also the least valuable one. The bigger shift was not writing faster. It was that a marketer could now build.
What it actually changed for me
The real unlock was not that I could produce copy in half the time. It was that I could ship things I used to have to file a ticket and wait a quarter for. Tools. Interactive experiences. Working software that sits in a funnel and does a job. I stopped thinking of AI as the thing that writes the words and started thinking of it as the thing that lets a marketer build the surface the words live on.
That is the difference between the 2023 me and the 2026 me. Back then I was asking whether a writing tool would help or hurt writers. Now I think that was the wrong question. The writing was never the moat. The judgment about what to make, for whom, and why, was always the moat, and it still is. AI just made it possible for one person with that judgment to go and build the thing.
So here is the version of my old conclusion I would write today. ChatGPT did not harm or help marketing. It raised the floor on production to the point where production stopped mattering, and it handed the people who can build a much bigger lever. The marketers who compound from here will not be the fastest writers. They will be the ones who keep changing what they build.
If you are a marketer figuring out that same shift, or a team hiring for exactly it, I would like to hear from you. You can reach me at nilotpalmsaharia@gmail.com or on LinkedIn.