ChatGPT, while advanced and capable of generating coherent and contextually relevant text, still has several limitations that make it inferior to authentic human writing. Here are some key ways in which ChatGPT falls short:

1. Lack of True Understanding: ChatGPT doesn’t truly understand the text it generates. It lacks genuine comprehension and is simply predicting what words and phrases are likely to come next based on patterns in the data it was trained on. Humans possess deep understanding, emotions, and the ability to connect ideas in a nuanced and meaningful way.
2. No Personal Experience or Creativity: ChatGPT lacks personal experiences, emotions, and creativity that humans bring to their writing. It doesn’t have genuine thoughts, feelings, or unique perspectives to draw from.
3. Limited Contextual Awareness: While ChatGPT can maintain a short-term context in a conversation, it can struggle with maintaining a deep, nuanced understanding of long conversations or intricate topics. It may sometimes provide responses that sound relevant, but are contextually incorrect or inappropriate.
4. Inaccurate Information and Biases: ChatGPT can generate inaccurate or outdated information since its responses are based on the data it was trained on. Additionally, if the training data contains biases, the model might inadvertently generate biased or prejudiced content.
5. Unsatisfactory Flow and Coherence: Although ChatGPT can produce coherent sentences, it sometimes struggles with maintaining a natural flow of thought, resulting in responses that may seem stilted or disjointed compared to human writing.
6. Limited World Knowledge and Creativity: ChatGPT’s knowledge is limited to what it was trained on up until September, 2021. It lacks access to new information and developments that have occurred since then. Moreover, while it can mimic creativity to some extent, its creative output is often based on patterns in the training data, rather than genuine imagination.
7. Empathy and Emotional Depth: Humans can infuse their writing with genuine empathy, emotional depth, and understanding of the human experience. ChatGPT lacks true emotions and can’t empathize in the same way.
8. Subjective and Aesthetic Judgments: Humans can make subjective judgments about aesthetics, art, beauty, and emotions that go beyond the scope of ChatGPT’s capabilities.
9. Adaptation to Individual Styles: Humans can adapt their writing to various styles, tones, and preferences of the intended audience. ChatGPT’s style may sometimes be inconsistent or not align well with specific audiences.
10. Errors and Misinterpretations: While humans can often catch errors, ambiguities, or misunderstandings in their writing, ChatGPT can generate responses that are grammatically incorrect, factually wrong, or contextually inappropriate without realizing it.
11. Dynamic and Evolving Responses: Humans can engage in dynamic, evolving conversations, responding to changing contexts and adjusting their responses accordingly. ChatGPT may struggle to adapt to rapidly shifting conversational dynamics.

In summary, while ChatGPT is a powerful tool for generating text and assisting with various tasks, it lacks the depth, authenticity, understanding, and genuine creativity that humans bring to their writing. It’s important to recognize its limitations and use it as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, authentic human writing.

Everything above that line was written by ChatGPT in response to this prompt: “In what ways is ChatGPT inferior to authentic human writing?” The only edits above were to correct for punctuation errors (yes, ChatGPT messes up its punctuation sometimes).

So, if those are the problems, how can ChatGPT help social media managers produce quality content?

Brainstorming

There’s nothing I particularly disagree with up there and I doubt I would have thought of all those problems with ChatGPT on my own (though it was a bit repetitive at times).

That’s the first hint about writing with ChatGPT. It’s good at gathering a range of ideas that you might not have thought of all by yourself. ChatGPT is good at brainstorming.

If you’re a social media manager, the pressure to constantly be coming up with new content can be frustrating, especially as you get the feeling that you have already posted similar content in the past. ChatGPT can help you come up with some new content ideas.

Outlining

Similar to brainstorming, ChatGPT will suggest an order for how information should be provided. It might need to be corrected, but it’s a starting point for how to organize your longer content, such as a blog article.

Speed

Even the most prolific writers with the quickest fingers in the planet would be hard pressed to produce quality original content at faster than 50 words per minute. (Yes, folks can type faster, but as they do, their ability to focus on quality content goes down.)

On the other hand, ChatGPT can produce about 400 words of passable—though rarely great—content in a few seconds. But there’s the problem again: a large amount of quickly available text is only good if the text is good; it’s mostly in the range of “okay.”

What does that mean for social media managers? ChatGPT can increase the speed of producing draft paragraphs. As noted above, ChatGPT loses the plot after a while, so you can’t use it to produce a first draft of a long document, but you can use it to produce a few paragraph, perhaps one contained section, as seen above. Given the problems, you’ll need to re-write those paragraphs to inject emotion and examples. You’ll need to make sure there’s continuity from one section to the next. But you’ll have a bit of draft material to work with more quickly.

Availability

Your generative-AI writing assistant never sleeps and never takes a day off. We mortal humans, on the other hand, need sleep and days off. Without that, our writing quality gets worse and worse.

Appropriateness

As a follow-up to the previous paragraph, ChatGPT never shitposts or drunk posts. The program is less likely to make embarrassing typos from fatigue or intoxication. For example, how easily can you post about your organization’s pubic places, instead of its public places? Oops for you, but that’s a mistake ChatGPT is unlikely to make.

A mistake ChatGPT will sometimes make, though, is to produce content that is politically problematic, such as reinforcing negative stereotypes. That must be accounted for and corrected.

And, for the record, when you’re tired, it’s time to stop posting on behalf of your organization. Never use social media while intoxicated.

Enhancing Vocabulary

In the same way that ChatGPT can help with brainstorming, it can help with rephrasing and vocabulary. The program can be asked to explain something better or with new word choices. In this way, it’s like a thinking thesaurus.

Role Playing

If you’re wondering how your audience might respond to a post, try asking ChatGPT. Ask the program how a well-defined audience (give some demographic and other information about the audience) would respond to a tweet you’ve drafted. Try it out with a few different audience archetypes described. Let this help you anticipate how people might engage with your content. Revise to get the results you want and see what happens.

Platform-Specific Prompt Strategies for AI-Assisted Writing

When using AI to create social media content, effective results depend on how well you design your prompt. Each platform has its own conventions, tone, and audience expectations, so prompts should be adapted to fit the platform and context. A single generic instruction such as “Write a post about climate change” will produce vague results, while a detailed prompt that reflects platform, audience, format, and goal will guide the AI to create content that feels authentic and usable.

Do not be afraid to produce a single prompt that runs two or three full paragraphs. That one long prompt will help improve output quality and could produce 20 or more sample posts. From there, you can pick and choose which you like and edit them before posting. You could also revise your quote.

Prompt design begins with understanding platform differences. A tweet must fit within 280 characters and sound conversational; a LinkedIn post can be longer and more formal. In contrast, an Instagram caption benefits from warmth and storytelling, whereas a TikTok description must be short and energetic. The same message will sound and look different across these platforms, so your prompt should always specify where the content will appear. The audience also matters; a message for students, professionals, or parents will differ in vocabulary, examples, and tone. Clarifying who the post is for helps the AI adjust style and focus.

Effective prompts also include practical constraints. Tell the AI the desired length or word limit, mention if hashtags or keywords are needed (or if they should be avoided), and specify a call to action, such as encouraging comments, visits, or downloads. A short example might look like this: “Write three versions of a 40-50 word LinkedIn post inviting recent college graduates to attend our free job-hunting skills webinar. Keep the tone friendly, motivational, and professional. Include one hashtag and end with a call to register.” See which of the three versions you like. If you don’t like any of them, tell the AI what you don’t like and ask for more versions. There’s no limit to how many versions you can ask for!

Practicing this kind of platform-aware prompting helps social media managers not only get better AI results, but also think critically about how communication changes across digital platforms.

Using Generative AI to Produce Images for Social Media

Using generative-AI to produce images opens a new frontier for social-media content: rather than relying solely on stock photos, canned templates, or expensive photography, social-media managers can now craft imagery tailored to brand voice, audience mood and platform format.

However, the tool is only as good as the prompt and the human supervision that follows.

The first step is to clarify what you want your generated image to achieve. Is it to raise awareness, illustrate a concept, humanize your organization, or drive engagement? Is there another purpose? If so, what is it? Be clear about your intentions.

Once that goal is clear, define the target audience you’re addressing (for example “Millennial urban volunteer interested in sustainability”), the platform (Instagram post, LinkedIn feed, or whichever platform), and the brand voice (friendly, professional, edgy, authoritative, or perhaps a combination of adjectives). Include that information in your prompt. Here’s an example: “Generate a photorealistic image, 1080×1080, of a diverse group of four college-aged adults planting trees in an urban community garden, late afternoon light, springtime, vibrant, but natural colours, brand tone: optimistic and empowering.” 

Try that out your preferred AI image generator and see what you get. A wide variety of free and low-cost options are available, such as from OpenAI, Google, Adobe, and other companies. Play around with the technology until you feel comfortable with producing the outputs you’re hoping for. Be patient and persistent, providing corrections as needed. The technology is amazing, but it requires a skilled and patient human user to maximize the results.

After crafting your prompt, consider the composition and format. If you’re making an Instagram reel thumbnail, square format works best; for a LinkedIn banner, you might go wide. Specify the resolution, aspect ratio and whether you want a portrait or landscape orientation. You might also add style cues: is it minimal and clean (for a corporate voice), or gritty and textured (for a non-profit activist approach)? Use descriptive terms in the prompt, such as “clean flat-design illustration with brand accent colour teal,” or “cinematic photo, shallow depth-of-field, warm tones.” Then generate several variants and pick the strongest one. Because generative-AI tools work probabilistically, you’ll often need to try several prompt tweaks to arrive at a desirable image.

Once you have a generated image, you must review it critically. Check for brand-consistency: does the image reflect your organization’s visual identity (tone, colours, diversity, setting)? Check for unintended biases or inaccuracies (for instance, people in unnatural poses, stereotypical representations, or odd artifacts). Many generative systems still struggle with fine details, such as hands, reflections, and symmetries. If you spot such anomalies, either regenerate with a refined prompt (e.g., “hands clearly visible, natural pose, no artifacts”) or use an image editing tool to fix them. Also, check for copyright or intellectual-property risks: even a generated image might include recognizable copyrighted items or mimic famous images. Finally, ensure accessibility. Add alt text describing each image so that people using assistive technologies can understand what you’re presenting to the audience.

Finally, be mindful of ethics. If you generate an image of people, you can’t claim that those are real people volunteering for your organization. If you render an image of what a project will look like after it’s been built, be clear that this is rendered projection of the completed building, not an image of a building constructed previously.

AI-Generated Content Review Checklist

Before publishing any AI-assisted content, review it carefully to ensure it aligns with your organization’s brand, upholds best ethical practices, and matches the social media platform where you’re posting. Use this checklist to double check your work.

1. Factual Accuracy
Verify all statistics, dates, quotes, and claims against reliable sources; to be clear, AI is not a reliable source. AI tools can invent or misstate details, so confirm every fact with an authoritative source before posting.

2. Tone and Voice Consistency
Check that the post matches your brand’s established tone, whether friendly, professional, witty, authoritative, or kid-friendly. The language should sound like your organization, not like a generic AI response.

3. Brand Alignment
Ensure the message supports your brand values, mission, and current campaigns. Remove any phrasing or claims that might conflict with brand guidelines or marketing strategy.

4. Representation and Bias
Review all content produced by AI for stereotypes, exclusionary language, or discriminatory portrayals of people’s gender, sexuality, age, race, ability, culture, or other identity or demographic-based traits. Your posts should be inclusive, respectful, and reflective of your organization’s diversity standards. (And if you’re not sure if something crosses a line, it definitely crosses that line.)

5. Audience Appropriateness
Confirm the content fits the expectations, literacy level, and interests of your intended audience. Check for cultural or regional references that may be misunderstood or inappropriate for the platform’s user base.

6. Legal and Copyright Compliance
Avoid unlicensed images, quotes, or music. If the AI used outside text or media as input, verify that no copyrighted material was reproduced. Ensure proper attribution when required.

7. SEO and Hashtag Strategy
Evaluate whether keywords and hashtags are relevant, current, and not misleading. Avoid overuse or banned tags. Align terms with your broader SEO or discoverability plan.

8. Platform Fit
Check the character/word count, formatting, and call-to-action language for platform norms. Each site has its own expectations for tone, length, and style. What works on LinkedIn may fail on TikTok and vice-versa.

9. Final Human Edit
Read the post aloud to catch awkward phrasing or AI artifacts. Adjust for flow, emphasis, and emotional tone. No AI-generated post should go live without human approval.

So much of what is described above boils down to this: ChatGPT will save you time and effort, but you must intervene to ensure you’re posting quality content. As the program wrote previously, “while ChatGPT is a powerful tool for generating text and assisting with various tasks, it lacks the depth, authenticity, understanding, and genuine creativity that humans bring to their writing. It’s important to recognize its limitations and use it as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, authentic human writing.”

Also, remember this: if you post content produced by AI, that means you posted the content. No software can be held accountable for the content it produces; you and your organization are accountable for all social media content you post. Don’t post anything where your boss, customers, or other stakeholders might feel tempted to hold you to account!

Acknowledgement

Generative artificial intelligence was used to support the production of this chapter.

OpenAI. (2025). ChatGPT (November 2 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat