ChatGPT is only a few months old but it’s already taken the internet by storm.

Even Mark Zuckerberg was caught off-guard and has now ditched his mighty Metaverse plans* to concentrate on what many people think is our next big leap.   

It’s hard not to get caught up in the hype. Especially when you can jump onto Chat GPT right now and get it to write thousands of words about any subject you want in mere seconds. Web copy, flyers, songs in the style of Nick Cave, ruminations on the meaning of life… ChatGPT can do it all – even social posts. But, as with any new technology, you need to balance the excitement with a healthy dose of realism. 

While it’s great for knocking out a lot of words, Ai still can’t give you a concept or write from human experience – which is somewhat essential to creating connections with customers. For example, if you want to sell a tropical holiday, the algorithm will scrape the internet and arrange words in a statistically probable order, resulting in some very predictable copy about coconut trees swaying in breezes and golden sand beaches. Try as you might, on regenerating it will only keep regurgitating the same thing, just in a different order. Not ideal when you’re competing with loads of other brands offering very similar holidays.  

A real person on the other hand, will try to build empathy, create a connection with the reader and speak to them like a friend. To avoid creating the same pitch as your competitors, a good writer will give their work an insight and an idea.  

There’s no doubt ChatGPT is amazing. But, for now anyway, you still need a real person to tell it what to create, to fact check it, ensure it makes sense and doesn’t get too carried away. For short, ideas-driven pieces like social posts, by the time you craft your prompts, you could write ten better ones yourself. For long copy, it definitely has its uses – even just to kickstart ideas.  

And it’s still early days. ChatGPT is only a few months old and its responses are already eerily human. Every day it learns and improves. Meanwhile competitors are racing to take the technology to the next level. Some people (including a now ex-employee) swear Google’s Lambda is self-aware and capable of having feelings. Scary stuff.  

One thing’s for sure. Ai is here, and it’s changing the way we do things, fast. The implications for finance, computing, marketing, transport, logistics and many other industries are huge.  

*In our ‘predictions for 2022’ blog we said we thought Mr Zuckerberg might be barking up the wrong tree.