Copywriters are cowering in the corners. Marketers are biting their nails. There’s a new bad boy in town, and his name is ChatGPT. 🤠
Unless you’ve been hiding under an internet stone, you’ve probably heard or read some hype surrounding the latest AI incarnation ChatGPT.
The new AI is the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded independent research body OpenAI foundation.
I’ve been playing around with the AI tool for the last month, and I’m blown away by what it can do.
It is a handy tool for generating topics of interest. I’ve been using the tool to help outline some topics for future blog posts and to strengthen some course topics.
A lot of the success of ChatGPT is the simplicity of its user interface. You simply ask the bot a question or give it a command in human words, and off it goes.
ChatGPT hit the news a few weeks ago when a PhD microbiologist created a 10-question quiz that would be appropriate as a final exam for college-level microbiology students.
Guess what? The AI chatbot aced the exam! 💥
We’re mostly all used to interacting with voice AI systems like Siri and Alexa, but ChatGPT takes the quality of information to the next level.
Of course, some say this is the end of copywriters and that marketing teams should start beefing up their resumes.
Three areas of caution, however.
1. ChatGPT’s ability to answer questions is limited to data up to and including 2021.
I asked the bot which year its data came from, and here’s the response.
“My knowledge cutoff is 2021, meaning that the information I have available to me is current up to that year. However, some information may be outdated as the world is constantly changing and new developments are happening all the time. If you have a question about a specific topic, I’ll do my best to provide the most current and accurate information available to me.”
Don’t bother asking about current events. It may speculate, but that’s all.
2. ChatGPT has no source of truth.
The AI bot has no sense of right or wrong. Sometimes it can get things wrong because the data it feeds on may need to be corrected. However, the way it writes sentences can make that untruth sound very plausible.
3. ChatGPT is just a regurgitation of other people’s data.
Educational institutions have been scrambling to ban the chatbot from campuses and running student work through plagiarism-detecting software.
According to an insider, the AI chatbot’s ability to quickly generate content caused a “code red” alert within the Google echelons. Google has made it clear that if it detects ChatGPT-generated content, it will penalise the “offending” websites’ rankings.
Will ChatGPT put humans out of a job?
No, not this incarnation of AI. However, the field is moving very fast indeed.
Amazon’s Echo, which we address as “Alexa”, only launched nine years ago in 2014. Look how far artificial intelligence (AI) technology has progressed since then.
As a technologist and a futurist, I’ll keep my eyes on how AI progresses over the next ten years. 👀
If you have yet to try ChatGPT, I urge you to give it a go. It’s free just now but I reckon it’ll move to a premium paid service soon.
Talk later.
Wil.
