ChatGPT - will it really change everything?

A.I. chatbots have long been in the works. Launched in 2022 by both OpenAI and Alphabet, A.I. chatbots were able to generate coherent and articulate factual content with more success than most had anticipated. While ChatGPT is unmistakably leading the charge (Alphabet’s Bard is still licking its wounds), A.I. chatbot software seems to provide outstanding efficiency across content development, but not everyone is going to be on the content creation gravy train.

First things first - let’s breakdown what it will do, and what it won’t.

What It Will Do

ChatGPT is fast to produce copy from a single, clear prompt. ChatGPT is a learning software - so right now and at least for the short-term, the simpler the task, the better the result. ChatGPT can replicate tone and meet a simple objective over about four paragraphs, any longer than that and it tends to get lost. ChatGPT is very good at writing short-form content with simple and clear objectives. This brings me to my next point.

All A.I. is a reflection of the information going into it. ChatGPT does what it is asked - the clearer the directions, the better the result. In this way, the program is similar to engaging a keen junior writer. Instagram captions, short-form sales copy, and simple conversational content? Too easy.

Support Lean Marketing Departments

ChatGPT is going to make life much, much easier for small business owners and lean/resource poor marketing departments. For businesses that rely on small and one person marketing teams to produce much of their marketing content, ChatGPT will provide time-saving efficiencies akin to bringing on a full-time junior writer. Instead of creating content from scratch, ChatGPT can create it for you to edit as required.

Support Experienced Writers

A lot of writers have been dabbling with forms of AI chat software for a while now, but ChatGPT is admittedly head and shoulders above previous offerings. The software is great for brainstorming and outlining – more than great, it’s brilliant. If you are in the business of creating content, ChatGPT is a great tool to support the development process. 

What It Won’t

ChatGPT struggles to deliver on complex requests, where extensive information does not already exist, and where that information require furthers synthesis to get to a conclusion. Think tender-writing, long-form articles/blog posts, or niche expert opinion pieces. In other words, ChatGPT struggles where critical thinking is required.

Can it highlight the features and benefits of a product? Yes. Can it comfortably compare one product to another with an understanding of why the comparison might be useful? Not without significant human input.  

Cannot Access Real-Time Information

ChatGPT is not connected to any external data sources, including the internet. This is to ensure its core function doesn’t get corrupted by constantly developing and changing information, which may have unforeseeable impacts on the way learning software behaves. For users, this means ChatGPT has no access to real-time information. ChatGPT’s education stopped in 2021, so it has no idea the Will Smith slap ever happened. As a result, it will not know if the information it’s using to generate content is obsolete or inappropriate – that’s up to you to cross-check.

It Won’t Always Tell The Truth

The core function of ChatGPT is to deliver logical responses based upon its extensive, yet static reservoir of general knowledge. It does this through its predicative capability and grasp of logic. But as Kirk might say to Spock, just because something is logical, doesn’t mean it’s accurate. In other words, ChatGPT frequently makes facts up.

Concerningly, it delivers these fabricated inaccuracies in a way that makes them sound completely plausible and unnoteworthy. This can be frustrating or downright dangerous, depending on your subject matter.

Artificial Hallucinations

This habit of making things up is referred to as “artificial hallucinations” by tech scientists, and has been noted by numerous users of the software to date. In February 2023, the Cureus Journal of Medical Science published an article on the behaviour of ChatGPT when used to generate short paragraphs on specific medical topics. This was with the aim to evaluate the text, and by extension, ChatGPT’s potential in writing medical literature.

While some of the material was accurate, notable inaccuracies proved interesting. When pushed to explain an erroneous medical statement with references, ChatGPT provided five medical papers from the early 2000s, complete with identifying PMID numbers (unique identifiers for cataloguing). None of these titles actually existed, and the allocated PMIDs were linked to completely different papers that had nothing to do with the content. When it was asked for more recent reference papers, ChatGPT responded with the same list, the dates altered to match the request. 

The authors concluded what many others have too – the resulting data is a mix of accurate and completely fabricated key facts, which, at first glance, read more than reasonable. They called for content generated by A.I. to be clearly identified as such, and for rigorous fact-checking controls to be applied to A.I. content.  You can find this article here. 

It May Not Save You Time

Say you want a 1,000 word blog post and you want to use ChatGPT. You’ve populated your requirements, and ChatGPT has delivered a not-too-shabby article. Wonderful, technology is a dreamland of opportunity. Now you have to edit; you need to fact-check, fix syntax, rewrite unnatural phrasing, streamline and add identified competitive search terms. A good writer would have included these elements during drafting, and what previously took 5 hours to write, now takes 5 hours to edit.

 Depending on the size of your team, this is either an immense help, or just another task on top of an already long list of management tasks.

ChatGPT Alone Won’t Improve Your Search Ranking

Let’s ignore the fact that ChatGPT is a major competitor to Google and its very existence may signal the end of the internet as we currently know it (no, you’re being dramatic). Google has developed an algorithm whose sole function is to ensure only high-quality, search-relevant, up-to-date, and user-orientated content ranks highly across search results. While a software, ChatGPT does not inherently understand and align with Google’s search algorithm, so it will not identify competitive search terms and thread them throughout your content. You’ll have to identify your own search terms and ask it to include them.

In the past, AI-generated content has been marked as spammy by Google, and websites using it to manipulate search rankings have been penalised. Recently, Google re-clarified their position on A.I. generated content, stating that any content — human or A.I. — created to manipulate search rankings (think poor quality blogs with glaringly obvious keywords and providing little informative value), would be penalised, while high quality content that meets Google’s Search Engine essentials, such as E-E-A-T, will continue to be rewarded. So, if you were thinking ChatGPT could churn out mass content and launch your website to the top of the rankings, you’ll have to rethink your strategy.   

ChatGPT And Search Engines

Now for the real meat and potatoes.

Google doesn’t want their search engine to have to sift through a multitude of gormless content to find the stuff that actually says something. In this way, Google has to act as a quality control on top of its own commercial agenda. In 2022 4.4 million blog posts were published each day, and that’s without the help of A.I. – if you give individual corporations the power to create on-mass content, it’s easy to see that without that quality control, the internet will become impossible to navigate and won’t be fit-for-purpose. Some people think that will happen anyway, so Google’s ability to manage ChatGPT, and A.I. in general, by limiting the onslaught of mass content, is important to maintain its current product (for now, anyway).

Leveraging ChatGPT

ChatGPT is like any newly automated service - like self-service kiosks and virtual assistants, they come with their own unique pros and cons. In a nutshell, ChatGPT is the equivalent of hiring a junior writer. It will follow clear directions well, and save time - depending on the complexity of your requirements and your current management bandwidth.

There are significant ethical conundrums we have to consider as A.I. becomes integrated with everyday services —concerns shared by employees of both Open AI and Google’s A.I. research body, DeepMind. This includes the colossal impact of systematic bias when repeated across multitudes of interactions, the likelihood that A.I. will eventually be used to automate messaging scams on a vast scale, or the reality that the data and programming used to model ChatGPT and A.I. software in general, are developed by private organisations with their own agendas and objectives, and altruism isn’t likely one of them.

But for now, it’s a helpful support tool, albeit one that will take work from graduate/entry level writers, or those industry part-time copywriters (like working parents and students), for whom smaller contracts are the bread and butter.

The more things change, eh?