What You Need to Know About ChatGPT

You’ve probably seen all the memes about ChatGPT by now. ChatGPT is a chatbot that generates language text eerily similar to human writing. And it can do it naturally. Like any tech, ChatGPT isn’t perfect, but the fact that its responses sound “real” has people talking.

And it has content creators, content marketers, and content strategists worried. Is ChatGPT the future of content marketing…and the end of copywriters and content strategists?

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT (which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a chatbot developed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research lab.

ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022 as a prototype. Since then, it has been getting tons of attention for its ability to simulate human conversation, write student essays without alerting anti-plagiarism software, play games, answer test questions, and more.

How does ChatGPT work?

We’re not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of how chatbot systems use natural language processing to generate text, because we’re not in the business of artificial intelligence. But simply put, ChatGPT is able to guess what it should write when prompted, based on previous texts it has processed.

Texts like, oh, everything available to us on the internet, for example. By tapping into all that info, ChatGPT can predict the right way to string words together to answer a question.

This is just a sample of what ChatGPT can do, according to people who have tested its capabilities:

To literally use ChatGPT, for funsies or for your business (which we’ll get to in a minute), all you have to do is create an OpenAI account with an email address and your phone number. Then, feel free to ask questions or give commands to the bot.

ChatGPT and content marketing

Now that we’ve covered what ChatGPT can do, you can see why many people are concerned about its abilities. Legit concerns, and not just paranoia from watching Black Mirror.

Are the robots taking over content marketing?

No.

It will change how we work. It’ll take time to adapt to those changes, especially as OpenAI fixes its flaws and expands its limitations. But it can’t completely reproduce our skills and experience.

What ChatGPT can do for your biz

ChatGPT can actually be a pretty effective tool if your budget is limited and you can’t afford a copywriter yet.

It can be used for tasks like:

Natural customer service chats (that don’t make you want to smash your computer)
Translating text from one language to another
Crafting generic email responses
Researching customer needs for products, services, or content

You can see how ChatGPT can save us time by automating and simplifying certain tasks, which we can always benefit from as biz owners, right?

What ChatGPT can’t do for your content

You might’ve noticed in TikToks and news articles that ChatGPT isn’t always right.

Some of the answers it provides to responses can be downright hilarious in how wrong or off-the-mark they are. Sometimes it doesn’t follow your instructions. It might repeat information in its response or give too long or too short of an answer.

ChatGPT isn’t connected to the internet, either.

It can only generate answers based on the text and data it has been given…which cuts off at the year 2021. OpenAI provides updates to the program manually, so if you need more recent data, you’re SOL.

While AI can do a lot, it can’t do everything. We content writers, copywriters, and content strategists are supporting you in a way that AI simply can’t.

Can’t figure out why your website isn’t nailing your brand voice? We’ll get it right by auditing your copy and content with a fine-toothed comb, tweaking a word here or a phrase there.

Want to add a podcast or YouTube channel to the mix but don’t know how to offer fresh content to your audience? We’ll adapt your content strategy to include a new content platform that serves your audience — but still brings something unique to the table.

Technology is neat. It can do great things for businesses. But it’s not infallible. And it’s not a perfect substitute for someone with creativity, human perspective, ethics, and a passion to help you succeed.

NOTE FROM LATASHA: I was recently speaking to a family friend who is in a very AI-dominated field. She said “ChatGPT is pulling from the oldest parts of the internet which are, historically, created by white middle aged, privileged, and able-bodied men.” I thought that was such a good point — and shows why we don’t want to necessarily use these tools to create dynamic, diverse content or advise our decisions as women, as people with disabilities, people with color, and so on.

ChatGPT is the future, but it’s not our competition

So, will ChatGPT replace us humans when it comes to creating content? No. It doesn’t have the nuance, originality, and real-time capabilities that we have.

Can ChatGPT benefit businesses? Yes, if you can’t hire human help and don’t mind automating specific tasks.

Could our thoughts on all this change as ChatGPT evolves? Yes, of course. Because technology evolves, and society adapts. (Remember when our math teachers warned us we wouldn’t have calculators in our pockets when we were grown up? Whoops.)

But for now, and for the foreseeable future, ChatGPT isn’t our enemy.