30th January 2023

What is ChatGPT and how does it impact digital marketing?

Unless you’ve been living a life without a WiFi connection, you’ve probably seen ChatGPT trending since last year. Run by OpenAI – the company that gave us the AI that can paint whatever you want from a few words -, it’s got everyone talking.

But it’s splitting opinion: It’s either the next best thing since sliced bread, or the onset of the apocalypse. And for digital marketing, it’s somewhere in the middle. So what do you think?

Before you can make your mind up, we’ve put together this quick guide to help you find out what it is, how it works, and what impact it can have on the digital marketing landscape.

Who is OpenAl?

OpenAI is a non-profit AI research company, and their mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. They define AGI as highly autonomous systems that outperform us humans at economically valuable work.

Founded by SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk and start-up entrepreneur Sam Altman in 2015, OpenAI was created to address concerns about the potential for catastrophe from the misuse of AI.

Since launching, they’ve created DALL:E – an AI system that creates realistic images and art from any type of description – as well as automatic speech recognition system Whisper. And just last year, they went live with ChatGPT.

Openal Image Chatgpt

What is ChatGPT?

Just like the cute little tracker that tells you when your Domino’s is arriving for dinner feels like you’re hearing from a human, ChatGPT is a chatbot that should feel a lot like talking to a human.

But what exactly does it do? Well, it can answer any question you can think of. It can help write essays, fictional stories, and if you’re needing a little luck, job applications. Better yet, it can help you debug code, deter criminals, and teach you dance moves. In fact, if it can give you an answer, you can ask it for anything - we’re thinking of trying for this week’s winning lottery numbers!

How does ChatGPT work?

The short answer is ChatGPT gets trained by human’s like it’s aiming to be the World’s Strongest person, and gets fed words like we feed ourselves chocolate on the weekends.

The long answer is that ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM). Using endless amounts of the world’s data, LLMs basically predict what word comes next in a sentence – it’s autocomplete on autopilot.

Using information from the internet to learn dialogue and human styling, as well as Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, ChatGPT has been trained to know what humans expect when they ask certain questions. It’s been taught to provide us with helpful, truthful, and harmless answers – it’ll even refrain from responding to anything potentially harmful, like illegal activities.

What are ChatGPT's limitations?

Limitless ideas often come with limitations to begin with. Just like the Genie only lets you make three wishes, ChatGPT has its flaws. Here are just some of its limitations so far:

1. It's wrong as much as it's right - There’s no real source of truth that it's trained with, so it’ll select the answer that feels right, but isn’t necessarily correct. So, before you go being too serious about it, it’s just as risky as using Wikipedia for your homework.

2. You have to give good questions to receive good answers - the quality of ChatGPT’s output depends entirely on the quality of your input – so the more in-depth the question, the better the answer.

3. It can't handle demand - Right now, ChatGPT is down as it’s apparently at capacity. Considering its aim is to benefit humanity, it’s only benefitting some of us right now.

How does it impact the digital marketing landscape?

Whilst we can all worry about robots making us redundant, there’s plenty of potential for ChatGPT to transform the digital marketing landscape. In theory, working collaboratively in tandem with AI solutions like ChatGPT should allow us to work smarter and create even more effective digital marketing strategies.

If ChatGPT can write entire essays for university students, craft poems about sorrow in the style of Sylvia Plath, and create entire chunks of code for apps, then ChatGPT can certainly help content. Currently, you could use it to help create and structure content if you’re struggling for initial ideas, and help you implement keywords and search intent.

In the future, implementing ChatGPT into digital marketing strategies could be used to unlock valuable insights into customer sentiment from feedback and comments. By better understanding how a customer thinks and feels about a brand, the more tailored your digital marketing strategy can be – and you’ll be able to find out the best way to reach them.

Paid media campaigns can become more personalised and targeted, using ChatGPT’s language model to tailor ads to individual’s interests, preferences and behaviour to increase engagement – but that does depend on its development because it currently doesn’t have access to real-time data, only text-based sources like books, articles, and social media.

Just like ChatGPT’s AI is constantly learning, so too are the people using it. Whilst these are just some of the potential impacts on the digital marketing landscape that AI chatbots can have, it's important we evolve the way we utilise these to our advantage. ChatGPT, and the wider world of AI, is a powerful tool to get ahead of your competitors.

Want to learn more about how your business can use these tools to evolve? Drop us a line at [email protected].

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