To ChatGPT, or not to ChatGPT: that is the search term

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and we hope not), you must have heard the name ChatGPT being tossed and thrown around conversations relating to technology, marketing, content, and AI. ChatGPT, tech’s newest toy, has every advertiser and marketeer intrigued, but this innovation is not just any AI, it’s generative AI.

What is generative AI? In a nutshell, it’s AI that can ‘generate’ new content, as opposed to relying on or analysing existing data. The sudden emergence of generative AI technology has sparked a frenzy in Silicon Valley, with “no topic in the world of technology attracting more attention and hype right now”.

Released by OpenAI (co-founded by Elon Musk), ChatGPT has been described as a “stunningly lifelike conversational language system”. According to the OpenAI website, they have trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.

To put it simply, ChatGPT can turn prompts into original essays, stories, songs, and images, following training on massive online datasets. And this could radically transform how we live and work.

According to a recent report, students are already using ChatGPT to help them write essays. Businesses are using ChatGPT to create copy for their websites and promotional materials, and to respond to customer-service enquiries. Lawyers are using it to produce legal briefs (ChatGPT passes the torts and evidence sections of the Multistate Bar Examination, by the way) and academics to produce footnotes.

While this is a revolutionary development in technology, critics and some experts claim that it will put artists, teachers, coders, and writers (including journalists) out of jobs. The flipside of this is that it will allow employees to tackle to-do lists with greater efficiency or focus on higher-level tasks. Marketers and thought leaders are slowly and steadily integrating ChatGPT into the ecosystem. “I see these technologies acting as a copilot, helping people do more with less,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. Microsoft has also confirmed its stake in OpenAI.

All things said, we can’t deny how interesting it’ll be to see what marketeers and advertisers make of this innovation.