What's Up With ChatGPT?

Everywhere you turn, you might hear about the phenomenon of ChatGPT, but do you know what it is? Where did it come from? Read on to learn about ChatGPT, including what it is, where it sources its information, and how to use it. You’ll also learn about the drawbacks and warnings of using this new technology.

What is Chat GPT?

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, is a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to respond to cues from human input, such as a question or prompt. OpenAI, a non-profit AI group, created ChatGPT as a language model, a computer program designed to develop human-like responses. For instance, if you ask ChatGPT a question such as “What is the capital of Alaska?” it can quickly answer “Juneau.” ChatGPT is the largest language model out there.

ChatGPT and Data

To enable ChatGPT to answer queries like the above, researchers fed the program thousands of pieces of data from Wikipedia, scholarly articles, newspapers, webpages, and books. Asked about its data set, ChatGPT states, “Specifically, the GPT-3 model, on which I am based, was trained on a dataset of over 45 terabytes of text data, which is equivalent to over 570,000 years of human conversation.”

When ChatGPT made its debut in November 2022, people were understandably excited about the possibilities of this AI, which appears to be the most advanced on the market. ChatGPT is free to use, but free users may hit delays when the service is in high demand. OpenAI also offers a paid version of ChatGPT, which they promise has “faster response speed” and “priority access to new features.” In February 2023, ChatGPT set a record as the fastest-growing application in history, growing to over 100 million users, per Reuters.

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How to Use ChatGPT

ChatGPT is still relatively new, but users already find plenty of uses for this technology. It can help you outline a blog post or put together a FAQ. Over 200 people list ChatGPT as a “co-author” on self-published books on Amazon.

Here are some other uses for ChatGPT and AI:

  • Outlining a blog post
  • Developing keyword ideas for your business
  • Creating a survey to distribute to your customers
  • Asking it to explain a difficult concept for a general audience
  • Summarize long blocks of text
  • Generating ideas for a business name

The key to ChatGPT is to remember it's the same as AI-generated art: it relies on your input. Give it vague questions or information; its response will yield the same. It’s a great brainstorming partner, but only if you can do the work. Good prompts, such as “Develop an email campaign for X customer,” works well, but “Write an email about our product” doesn’t.

Drawbacks to GPT

While ChatGPT is a handy tool, there are significant downsides to ChatGPT. It doesn’t simply regurgitate facts but uses its programming to analyze its data sets and construct a response. If you use ChatGPT for writing a blog post or other marketing materials, you prepare for the following:

  • Missing or incorrect information
  • Simply misstated facts
  • Outdated knowledge
  • Broken links for sources
  • Repeated information to the same prompts

ChatGPT may type like a human but can’t think like a human. It fails in context clues and logical thinking at times. Ask ChatGPT for a travel itinerary for Miami, Florida, and it may tell you to visit specific closed sites or fail to consider the distance between locations for a 1-day excursion.

Using ChatGPT also means you must fact-check all of its responses. If you ask for a source for ChatGPT’s information, it may offer broken or missing links because ChatGPT can’t access the internet in real-time. ChatGPT also has a limited source of information and, to date, is only knowledgeable about events up to September 2021. It basically “thinks” that it is 2021, and therefore, everything from 2022 and 2023 is the “future.”

Question: What movies came out in 2022?

ChatGPT: I don't have access to information about future events or movie releases beyond my cutoff date of 2021. However, you can check online movie databases or websites of movie production companies for updates on upcoming movies in 2022.

If your company relies on the latest trends and practices, ChatGPT may be too stuck in the past for you regarding marketing. However, one of the most significant limitations of ChatGPT is that its responses may be racist, sexist, and biased, something the creators promise they’re fixing. There’s also the problem where ChatGPT creates articles that don’t exist and attributes them to The Guardian or The Washington Post.

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Why You Can’t Rely Just on ChatGPT for Marketing

Those users who want an authentic, human voice from ChatGPT may also be disappointed by its responses. Because it doesn’t think, feel, or see like a human, it can’t embody its answers with feeling or emotion; it only pulls from its data set and constructs sentences.

While these tips can help you figure out how to write and utilize AI for writing, you need to talk to a professional to establish a proper content plan for your business. Contact us at AHA for more up-to-date marketing tips.