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What Is ChatGPT?
If you've spent any time on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or just, you know, online generally over the last couple of months, you will have no doubt come across people talking about something called ChatGPT.
If you've been left a little perplexed by what it is and what it can do or have already spent more than enough time wondering what all the fuss is about, then you're not alone.
Since it launched in November 2022, it seems to have disrupted the creative world given what it is capable of.
If you've got questions, then we're going to aim to answer some of those. What is it? Why has it caused such a stir? Why does it matter so much? Let's lift the lid on ChatGPT!
WHAT IS CHATGPT?
ChatGPT, at its core, is an advanced piece of software that acts like an incredibly clever chatbot.
Now we're all used to dealing with these things at a very basic level when we're trying to get help from a customer service team on a website (when all you really want to do is speak to a real person), but ChatGPT is not only next level, it's the next 100 levels after that too.
ChatGPT was created by a company called OpenAI, founded and funded by amongst others Elon Musk (although he has since stepped down from the board) and Sam Altman, but has also attracted huge investment from Microsoft.
OpenAI itself is the San Francisco-based research organisation behind ChatGPT. It was funded with $1 BILLION by some serious venture capital heavy hitters like Musk and Peter Thiel (amongst others).
Whatever you might think about them personally, they state their mission is to ensure...
"artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity".
Quite the claim!
Now this feat of software design is here in its 3rd iteration (the 4th is planned for early 2023), ChatGPT (or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) uses artificial intelligence to answer your questions and can even generate original content based on criteria set by you by gathering information from the wider internet.
Still not sure, let's get ChatGPT to describe itself:
“ChatGPT is an advanced AI language model developed by OpenAI that uses a neural network architecture to generate human-like text responses. It has been trained on a large corpus of text data and can be used for a wide range of language-related tasks, such as answering questions, generating text, and even carrying out conversations.”
As we mentioned, ChatGPT was launched in November 2022 but since then, it has made a huge impact in both the creative and subsequently the mainstream media by revolutionising the way AI-generated text content is created.
Ask it for something, and it will deliver! Seriously, it's amazing, but it's not perfect. Ask it a question and it will answer it. Ask it to create a biblical verse and you'll be blessed with it. Task it with coming up with a sales pitch for you? Sold! Want it to debug your code? Done.exe!
In just a few short months (at the time of writing), it has gained over 100 million users and even given the creators of Google a new-found impetus, so much so that they issued a 'code red' warning for the impact it might have on their search business. Don't feel too bad, Google is developing its own system called LaMDA.
No surprise since the Microsoft investment paid dividends when, in February 2023, Microsoft announced that it's building an upgraded version of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine! The AI-powered gloves are off it seems!
HOW DOES CHATGPT WORK?
If you've used ChatGPT, you might think it's powered entirely by witchcraft, but it's not (well, probably not).
ChatGPT actually uses two things to be able to generate its answers;
Machine learning (the AI part)
The information generated from the internet circa 2021.
Think of the machine learning aspect of ChatGPT as a digital version of a human brain, complete with artificial neurons, but one that can hold and draw upon an enormous amount of information (i.e. the internet, but the web from a couple of years ago).
By using a combination of these two things, ChatGPT can generate responses to really quite
complex questions and can converse in a very human-like manner.
It's this conversational nature, combined with a consumer-friendly user interface and the sheer variety and scope of its uses that has so many people excited (and nervous if you're Google) by the potential of ChatGPT.
WHAT CAN CHATGPT DO?
If you're still hung up on the chatbot analogy we used earlier, then we've done it a disservice. ChatGPT can do A LOT more than that. This includes (but is certainly not limited to)
Translate language (not all, but it can currently translate English, Spanish, French, German and Chinese).
Write code (give it a brief and can write a computer code for you).
Generate content (including blog posts, summaries, articles even whole books).
Knowledge Retrieval (ask it questions and gets helpful (well usually) answers. Like another version of Google (i.e. Bing), probably why Google got spooked by it!).
Power other ChatBots through APIs (companies are using it to run their own customer service, sales, and healthcare bots).
Sounds amazing right? But what's the downside? Are we all going to be out of a job?
IS CHATGPT ACCURATE?
For all the incredible things ChatGPT can do and the technological advances involved in its creation, it still relies on information created by fallible human beings for much of the answers supplied through its 'training data'.
This includes the information people post on the web, not to mention in forums and across social media.
It, therefore, stands to reason that the quality of the output is going to be governed to some extent but how good the inputs are.
It's also worth considering that 'accurate' isn't the binary concept we think it is. What's right and wrong, good or bad might also be determined by subjective determinations.
Humans are a diverse bunch so asking it subjective questions like "What makes a good movie?" or "Give me an example of a good political policy?" will be determined by your own societal, cultural or political beliefs.
Over recent years, we've also had to come to terms with 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' so good luck to AI when it comes to navigating that maelstrom!
There's no doubt, given the scale of what's possible with ChatGPT, that there is a wealth of data utilised, but there remains a large question mark over where it gets its information.
Whilst we don't fully know all the sources of information it uses to compile its answers, chances are it doesn't scour EVERYTHING online, just a cross-section. There's simply too much information to expect it to draw on the entire internet.
You'd expect it covers the most popular, trustworthy sources (especially given that grandiose mission statement), but we just don't know for sure. The fact is much of what it uses will have some element of bias, one way or another. It was created by humans after all.
As we said earlier, ChatGPT isn't perfect.
When you use it, sometimes the answer to questions can vary based on how you phrase the question so, if you're going to use the answers for your own website, it would be worth fact-checking anything it generates before publishing it, especially as its relying on information from 2021. It also doesn't output any rich media i.e. (images, video or audio) or web results (yet).
Later versions will no doubt utilise more up-to-date information but bear in mind that, whilst it's incredible what it can do, don't assume what it outputs is error-free or doesn't need fact-checking.
When you do a Google search, you can see what it takes you and where the information comes from and can make decisions on how trustworthy it is. With ChatGPT, if we don't know what it's sources are, how can you trust what it gives you?
IS IT FREE?
Currently, at the time of writing, it is, but expect that to change in the future. With the sheer amount of people using it, its current free incarnation may be slow or it might only be accessible to a limited selection of users at a time.
There are plans for a paid version, tentatively called ChatGPT+ (obviously, those investors didn't spend a BILLION dollars for fun), but for now, it's free to use.
WHAT NEXT FOR CHATGPT?
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR CONTENT CREATORS (LIKE US.. OR YOU)?
So for digital marketing agencies like us, or anyone who creates original content, you might be thinking that the games up. Maybe not today, but if this version of ChatGPT (or more advanced ones in the future) can create content in the blink of an eye, where does that leave us mere mortals?
A big part of our revenue comes from copywriting, whether that's blog posts, articles, ghostwriting books for clients, but with ChatGPT spewing out content in no time, then is original, SEO-optimised and unique content crafted by people like us dead? We don't think so.
On the surface, if ChatGPT becomes a mainstream staple then us, and creators like us, could lose out financially and , if that's the case, then obviously we'll produce less content. But if that happens, then given that ChatGPT uses what's published online at its core, then it has less material to work with and learn from, making itself less useful in the process.
Granted, if we stopped produicing content then the internet isn't going to run dry, but as that happens more and more, with more and more creators creating less and less, then ChatGPT ends up in a doom spiral and starts to rely on content that it might have written already. It might, in fact, plaguarise itself to death!
Much of our other revenue comes from our SEO work and the advances in ChatGPT mean we're not immune from that either.
The biggest threat from ChatGPT in terms of SEO is the fact that, as Microsoft has shown recently, it may eventually begin to displace traditional search engines, like Google, as our defacto knowledge retrieval system.
Why spend time scouring SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) when AI can give you the answer immediately? No doubt Google will start to offer a hybrid version of its search engine too that utilises both traditional search and AI-powered results.
The fact that many people might not fact-check the answer will certainly be a worrying, if not unexpected consequence.
SQUARING THE CIRCLE
It's probably still too early to fully comprehend its ramifications for businesses like ours, especially in terms of copywriting. Maybe ChatGPT is only going to end up writing articles nobody wants to write for people who can't be bothered to read them.
It could bring about a whole new SEO landscape, especially for companies for whom their existence is predicated on optimising websites that have Google at their core. Maybe ChatGPT will conceive another industry that deals solely in AI. Time will tell, but Pandaro's Box is well and truly opened.
If you haven't tried it already and want to give it a go, you can sign-up for an account on their website over at https://chat.openai.com.
Once you've got your account set up, it’s just a case of using their text-based interface to ask it whatever questions you can think of or request content from it. The more detailed your query, the better results.
Have you tried ChatGPT yet? What are your thoughts? Do you think it will impact on your industry and if so, how? Let us know in the comments below.
If you're still wanting your original, engaging SEO-optimised content to be created by human beings with an eye for detail, then give us a call or you can take a look at our Copywriting page for more detail. Whatever you need, we deliver!
Blog photo courtesy of Possessed Photography on Unsplash