Using placeholder text like “Lorem Ipsum” has been a common practice in the web development industry for years. While it serves the purpose of filling in the gaps in design mock-ups, it does fall short in creating engaging and realistic copy that can indicate how captivating and attention-grabbing content can be to audiences. On top of this, it can be very misleading about how much space copy will actually take up. We are pretty convinced that some may have experienced an “oh no, the design doesn’t work now that the real copy is in”- scenario.
This is where the use of language models like ChatGPT comes into play. ChatGPT is designed to generate human-like text that is coherent, relevant, and engaging. Unlike Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, the content generated by ChatGPT is contextual, and it can be tailored to match the tone and style of the website or application.
Moreover, ChatGPT can also be trained on specific topics and domains, making it even more powerful in generating relevant content. For example, if you’re creating a website or application in the healthcare industry, you can train ChatGPT on medical terminology and jargon, allowing it to generate content that is truly relevant and specific to that industry.
The content generated by ChatGPT is not only relevant and engaging, but also saves time and resources. Instead of using something like Lorem Ipsum with its limitations, or spending hours creating dummy content from scratch, or waiting for a content creator, you can leverage ChatGPT to generate high-quality content in a matter of minutes — content that mimics how a person would write, or speak, meaning that you also get the right tone of voice for your specific project.
The other advantage of using ChatGPT-generated content is that it can be easily customised and edited to fit the specific needs of the project, and it does give a much more realistic view of how much space content will actually take up, and thus ensure that prototypes are even more representative of the final output.
Yet another huge advantage is that you can also generate content in pretty much any (or multiple) language(s), which makes it extremely versatile and very useful for any project that spans beyond the Anglo-American sphere, and across many regions, and even alphabets.
We are not suggesting to just let something like ChatGPT generate the content and then just slap that into your designs — like any AI-generated outputs, we still need to check, fine-tune, and correct here and there, at least as AI keeps developing and improving.
One thing that is clear is that the overall time spent on the process of generating content will be majorly reduced. Designers, developers and / or content creators can not only fine-tune the generated text and tailor the content to meet their exact requirements, but also add their own voice and personality.
We have already seen this in practice as we recently went through a hiring cycle for a new designer, and pretty much all candidates had opted to use ChatGPT to generate their “dummy content”, for any prototypes or mock-ups they were showing us, rather than opting for something like Lorem Ipsum, which was definitely the most common choice in any of our previous hiring cycles.
Also, for our internal team, we have since long ago tried to stay away from Lorem Ipsum for the very reasons previously mentioned — it just isn’t realistic enough! Honestly, though this decision has on more than a few occasions meant that the team has spent quite a lot of effort working with a client to find acceptable “temporary” copy/content, it was the right decision, as we feel that we have had a much better joint understanding of the final product/site/platform etc. In some cases, we have worked so well on it (and maybe spent a bit too much time) that what we intended to be temporary, has ended up being what partially actually appears in the final product.
As we are now using ChatGPT as a tool to help generate content, we get realistic content much faster, and with edits and fine-tuning, we can still be confident that it is solid, engaging, and contextual, without losing our stamp on it.
Conclusion
The impact of technologies like ChatGPT on modern development is undeniable. By leveraging the power of language models, developers and content creators can generate high-quality content quickly and efficiently, without compromising on quality or relevance. The content generated by ChatGPT is contextual, engaging, and can be fine-tuned, and customised to match the specific needs of the project. This opens up endless possibilities for designers, developers and content creators to create innovative and engaging prototypes, applications and platforms that stand out in the crowded digital landscape.
This could mean that the death of Lorem Ipsum is here as AI offers a more versatile, efficient, and reliable alternative, and as AI continues to evolve, it will become an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to create content that resonates with their particular audience. Lorem Ipsum may have served its purpose well, but it’s time for a new era of placeholder text that is powered by AI — R.I.P. Lorem Ipsum, and thank you for your services!
Note:
We, with intention, wrote this article not using an AI, but then curiosity did get the better of us, and we had to ask it to see what it would come up with… What it generated was (as could be expected) good, and as stated in the article, very much quick, contextual and ready to be fine-tuned. We did end up taking a few sentences/extracts from the AI-generated text to pad out this article a bit, and just to add some stuff that we thought was extremely relevant.
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