When robots write: How AI will impact marketing

Artificial intelligence has been a buzzword for a long time. But for me, it wasn’t until recently that the seemingly science-fiction term became a reality. Sure, Deep Blue was using AI in 1997 to beat some of the best human chess players, and IBM’s Watson crushed its human competition on Jeopardy! in 2011. These AI applications were pretty cool and eventually made their way into the business world, with IBM leading the way, followed by other big tech players like Amazon, DeepMind (Google) and Meta.

But more recently, some of the most impressive and widely utilitarian AI examples have come from OpenAI. Its DALL-E 2 is a big part of the recent AI-generated image trend (we used it to generate the robot image with this blog), and OpenAI has taken the world by storm with its new ChatGPT chatbot. So I’m letting ChatGPT do the heavy lifting on this post to show what it can do—I asked it some questions about itself and how it might change the world of content creation, media and advertising. Here’s how our conversation went.

QUERY #1: Write a blog post to explain what ChatGPT is, how it works and how it will change the future of content.

ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that uses natural language processing to enable users to have engaging, human-like conversations with it. ChatGPT is based on the popular GPT-3 language model, which has been trained on vast amounts of text data to enable it to generate human-like responses to user inputs.

One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to continue a conversation based on previous interactions. This means that users can have a conversation with the chatbot that flows naturally and feels more like a conversation with a real person. This is possible because ChatGPT has been trained on a wide range of conversation data, allowing it to understand the context and nuances of language in a way that many other chatbots are not able to.

In addition to its conversational abilities, ChatGPT can also generate written content based on user prompts. This means that it can be used to write articles, essays, or even entire books. This is a significant development, as it has the potential to revolutionize the way that content is created. Instead of relying on human writers, ChatGPT can be used to generate high-quality written content in a fraction of the time.

My thoughts: The start of ChatGPT’s reply was informative, but I deleted its last two paragraphs (which switched from informative to salesy) and asked it to shorten some responses later on. This AI has a lot to say.

I also realized my query was too focused on content and not enough on the other aspects of advertising and media marketing at large. So, I asked the ChatGPT to add a section covering that larger scope.

QUERY #2: Can you add a section about how ChatGPT will influence advertising and media marketing?

ChatGPT: One potential application of ChatGPT in advertising and media marketing is in the creation of personalized, engaging advertisements and marketing materials. By using ChatGPT's natural language processing capabilities, businesses can create ads and marketing content that is tailored to individual customers, based on their preferences and interests. This could lead to higher engagement and conversion rates, as customers are more likely to respond to content that is relevant to them.

In addition, ChatGPT could also be used to automate the creation of social media posts and other types of content. This would save businesses time and resources, as they would no longer need to rely on human writers to create this content. Instead, they could use ChatGPT to quickly generate high-quality content that can be shared on social media platforms.

My thoughts: Again, ChatGPT’s reply started off informative before feeling more like a sales pitch, which I deleted. If you’re using AI-generated content for thought leadership, keep an eye out.

This is when I started to get a little skeptical about job security in my future. Let’s get ChatGPT to tell us why it’ll be useful tool but not replace human intelligence across our industry.

QUERY #3: Can you add a part about how an AI won’t take my job?

ChatGPT: It is understandable to be concerned about the potential impact of AI on employment. However, it is important to recognize that the development of AI, such as ChatGPT, does not necessarily mean that human jobs will be replaced. Instead, AI is likely to augment human capabilities and allow us to do our jobs more efficiently and effectively. In addition, the development of AI can also create new job opportunities.

My thoughts: This answer started out very long, so I asked ChatGPT to make it more concise—and then asked it to shorten it even more. I wish this thing was around when I was in school. Since ChatGPT was giving me impressive, relatively well-written responses to my prompts and queries, I started to wonder about its input and data training process. So I asked.

QUERY #4: What types of input has ChatGPT been trained on? Just things published on the open web, television and streaming?

ChatGPT: I’m sorry, I am not able to browse the web or access any information outside of my training data, which ends in 2021. I am a large language model trained by OpenAI, and I am not able to browse the web or access any information outside of my training data. I am designed to assist with natural language understanding and generation, and I can provide general information and answer questions to the best of my abilities based on my training.

My thoughts: I wasn’t completely satisfied with the answer on training inputs, so I tried another query to dig in deeper.

QUERY #5: What did the training data consist of for ChatGPT’s AI?

ChatGPT: As a large language model trained by OpenAI, I am not able to provide specific information about the training data used for ChatGPT or any other AI model. Large language models like myself are typically trained on vast amounts of text data, which can include books, articles, and other written materials. This data is used to teach the model how to understand and generate natural language, allowing it to have human-like conversations and generate written content. However, I do not have access to any specific information about the training data used for ChatGPT or any other AI model.

My thoughts: ChatGPT seemed a little less comfortable when I asked more pointed questions about its data inputs and how it learned to do what it does. It felt a bit like a combination of the AI trying to assuage my fears about it replacing human intelligence with an attempt to protect OpenAI’s intellectual property.

Still, I think ChatGPT makes a good point about not taking my job, despite plenty of impressive AI features, including the ability to write custom code upon request. And it still needs our human inputs and characteristics—like empathy, imagination, humor and creativity—to make itself useful as a content, media and advertising tool.

Technologies like sophisticated AI chatbots will certainly change the way we create in the future, but I don’t think we have to worry about them taking over just yet.

ChatGPT is still in a preview beta mode and does require an email, first name, last name and phone number to sign up for a universal OpenAI products account. You can check out ChatGPT’s FAQs and try it for yourself here.

Curious about content and AI? Reach out today to keep the conversation going.