All Conquering or all Hype? ChatGPT one year on

As ChatGPT recently marked its first birthday, Nick Floyd, Head of Content at Catalyst digital marketing agency investigates the real impact tech’s latest watershed moment has had so far and whether the hype has been justified.

It’s easy to see why ChatGPT’s arrival was met with such global fanfare. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), of course, isn’t new. For years, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 have been widely used to produce and analyse vast amounts of language to produce human-like text for all types of business purposes. However, generally they were clunky, required lots of prompting and generated mixed results.

Last November ChatGPT changed all this. Unlike anything seen before, it arrived able to generate text that is as close to the real deal as it gets. Users were quick to embrace its potential to write emails, copy and proposals, construct music, create poetry, even code. Studies revealed it could pass exams and fool teachers. Put simply, for the first time it took the once distant, futuristic AI concept and put it firmly into the place of our everyday reality.

With Pandora’s box opened, twelve months on and we continue to see ongoing furore around the long-term implications of using this new tool. Principally, concerns surround its potential to diminish the need for content creators, marketers and customer services. The premise being that we could be in real danger of AI taking over. But is it really so?

The truth is that while ChatGPT is certainly useful, there’s scope for improvement. In this way, as with most major innovation leaps, there are a number of pros and cons to consider when it comes to weighing up the benefits of joining the automation bandwagon.

Take, for instance, when it comes to using it as a research tool. Whether you’re working on background context for a new pitch or doing market research for a new sector, the research process and finding the correct sources can be challenging and time-consuming. ChatGPT can prove hugely helpful here, with its ability to extract valuable information from extensive datasets or large articles quickly and with an ease being unmatched.

If you enter, for example, “what are the latest retail footfall trends?” into a traditional search engine, you’ll get a slew of results to sort through. In contrast, ChatGPT is able to provide instant, user-friendly responses, usually in easy bullet points or step-by-step guides.

Fundamentally though, it isn’t fool-proof. Because ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, it is only able to give you access to information or resources after 2021, and cannot provide you with a direct link to the source of the information. This means that there can be huge scope for inaccuracies and misinformation – as demonstrated by plenty of examples on social media of AI getting something factually incorrect.

Within this, generative AI runs the risk of inherent bias and discrimination, meaning a certain level of human-intervention is always required. The danger is that if people start using ChatGPT as a search engine without looking at a number of sources, views and doing their own supplementary research, it could amplify particular viewpoints. By comparison, Google results are in real-time and include full sources (most of the time).

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Onto another key area of focus – does ChatGPT spell the end of the copywriter? The answer is no, not really. Yes, if you ask it to write an article about a particular topic the chances are that it will respond with a fairly impressive result in an almost human-like manner. Almost is the key word here though. It will likely be far from the finished article, and require further prompting and editing before it can be used in the real world.

There is also the risk of oversaturation of the same content. Say, if all manufacturers use it to ‘write a blog on efficiencies in the manufacturing process’ without much personalisation, all blogs on this topic will be the same. Of course, blogs and other online articles are often used to help SEO, so it remains to be seen how brands will gain an organic visibility advantage over competitors using this method.

Equally, ChatGPT’s potential to enhance customer services lends itself to another interesting debate. Indeed, it can prove a fantastic tool in providing a swift and effective response to customer enquiries 24/7 to ensure ‘always on’ customers service at all times – without the need to sleep or even take a bathroom break.

However, though it can generate human-like prose, it still lacks the emotional intelligence and empathy that a human would possess. This can be a significant limitation in customer service, where emotions and empathy play a vital role in resolving customer issues and building trust.

Finally, let’s consider one of the most important aspects of any marketing team – creativity. At a fundamental level, all AI tools have limited creativity because it relies on using massive amounts of prior data to learn. Put simply, this means that there is no way to truly think of novel ideas that don’t yet exist. Importantly, creative concepts often rely on an emotionally-charged connection between brand and consumer – something AI simply can’t account for. Therefore, while it can be used to help support the creative process, that’s not to say it can help brands come up with their next big idea.

As we mark ChatGPT’s first birthday, while it has certainly made waves in being the first generative AI chatbot of its kind, there are still some many chinks in its delivery which need to be ironed out. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day and some of the world’s biggest breakthroughs didn’t happen on their first iteration. It’s likely then that there is a lot more from ChatGPT to come, bringing cause for, most likely, a further conversation.

About Catalyst

Catalyst is a well-established, award-winning full-service digital marketing agency dedicated to doing things differently – by placing focus on tangible results (rather than vanity metrics) to deliver meaningful business impact and positively impact your bottom line.

With offices in both Birmingham and London, they specialise in providing marketing support to B2B and B2C businesses operating in sectors including: finance, energy, tech, manufacturing, insurance and office design & build.

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