3 things communications and marketing people need to know about using ChatGPT
It was tempting to brief ChatGPT to write a blog on what marketing and comms folk need to know about the technology and call it a day. But, for reasons we’ll discuss later, that isn’t a good idea. So, while we’ve certainly leant on ChatGPT for the words below, the copy has been carefully and lovingly edited by a pair of living and breathing humans: Lottie (digitally curious but a bit worried ChatGPT might signal an AI revolution where the robots take over) and Jaquie (digital whiz, not worried about robot revolutions).
We hold monthly Curious Lab sessions where we bring the team together with the aim of sparking creative thinking. This monthly Jaquie, Digital Account Director, led the session, introducing the team to ChatGPT. Something we’d all heard about (how can you have missed it?) but lots of questions remained on how the technology might apply to the healthcare comms sector. And another question remained: would ChatGPT steal our jobs? We’ve already briefly mentioned ChatGPT in a previous blog, but this article will go into a little more detail to give you exactly what you need to know about the platform and what it means for us as communications and marketing professionals.
What is ChatGPT?
What is ChatGPT, then? We turned the question to ChatGPT itself and it told us: “ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a cutting-edge chatbot technology that has the potential to revolutionize the way businesses interact with their customers. ChatGPT combines the power of natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to create highly personalized, human-like conversations with customers.”
Let’s simplify the above – a good example of why human review is needed on all copy ChatGPT churns out. ChatGPT is a chatbot created by Open AI 2022, it allows users to enter written prompts and receive human-like responses. Based on language models, it is trained to understand what you mean when you ask a question and it’s constantly learning. So far it has over 100 million monthly active users, two months into launch; compare that with TikTok which took nine months to reach a similar figure.
ChatGPT free vs ChatGPT plus
After two months of unlimited free use, OpenAI has announced a subscription model for ChatGPT.
You will still be able to access the chatbot for free but those who pay a monthly subscription for “ChatGPT Plus” will have priority at busy times and access to new features.
Here’s how the paid version differs from the free one:
- Access during peak times
- Faster responses
- Priority access to new features (it’s unclear at this point what these new features will be but OpenAI has already been updating the chatbot with small improvements).
How do we use it?
The ways we can harness ChatGPT as communications and marketing professionals are limitless, but there are three main areas we think will make an impact. And importantly, it won’t steal our jobs.
#1 Content creation:
Without a doubt this is where we see the biggest opportunity for ourselves and our clients. With a good brief, ChatGPT can provide the basis of articles, blog posts, product descriptions, meta descriptions, video scrips, social media captions, maybe even press releases. There is a BIG caveat here, however. Even with a good brief, the content that ChatGPT produces should always be treated as a jumping off point, particularly in an industry as highly regulated as healthcare. That said, we’ve found that ChatGPT can create a useful basis to build content from, saving time.
#2 Coding
When it comes to coding, ChatGPT has been proven to be a valuable tool already. It can help you by providing code samples, suggesting code changes, and helping to debug code. It can also help with writing code from scratch, based on natural language instructions and learn from previous conversations. It can also help with finding the right syntax, best practices, and other coding tips.
#3 Chatbots
A chat bot is a programme that uses AI and NLP to understand customer questions and automate responses to them, simulating natural conversation. The result is typically a high return on investment (ROI), and chatbots can be a useful addition to patient and healthcare professional facing website, as long as local codes of practice relating to communications around prescription medicines and adverse events reporting are followed.
Creating a chatbot using ChatGPT offers several benefits. First, it can help reduce the time and effort required to build a chatbot from scratch. Second, it can help you generate code quickly and accurately, with suggested code changes to help you write the best code for your chatbot. Finally, it can help you debug any code you have written, helping you identify and fix any errors.
Watch-outs
It’s tempting to hail ChatGPT as the cure-all for all marketing and comms workload and technical challenges, BUT while there are lots of different ways that we can use the platform to make our jobs easier, there are a few things we need to keep front of mind.
- #1 ChatGPT is only as good as the prompt you give it. Much like briefing your agency, ChatGPT can only do a good job if you provide a carefully considered brief. Rather than “write a blog on sustainability” you might instruct it to “write a blog of 1000 words for an audience of marketing professionals on the topic of carbon offsetting. Use a formal tone of voice.”
- #2 Remember that ChatGPT pulls on pre-2021 content. AI is only as good as the data is trained on. ChatGPT pulls on pre-2021 content only, meaning that it cannot access any data or content that has been created after 2021. This can be limiting when it comes to developing a chatbot, as the content that ChatGPT can access may not be current or up-to-date.
- #3 Always, always carefully review and edit content ChatGPT writes. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, ChatGPT provides human-like content, the key is here is human-like; while the copy that it develops is undoubtedly a good dupe for human generated copy it isn’t the same. You’ll want to carefully review the copy for tone of voice, content, clarity and to ensure all relevant regulatory codes are followed.
Secondly, while Google has said it won’t penalise AI-generated content as long as it provides value to the user, copy will need to be carefully edited to make sure it is indeed relevant and valuable, and reviewed/edited with same SEO principles in mind for human-developed copy.
Google is searching for ways to reassure people that it is still out in front in the race for the best artificial intelligence technology. It has now launched Bard to compete against ChatGPT, Bard is an AI chatbot that uses a different language model called Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). But the question remains: which one should you use? Is one of these AI better at certain tasks than the other? Is one more accurate? Only time will tell.
The takeaway
The very best way to get to know ChatGPT isn’t reading blogs about it (although, thanks for getting this far!) it really is to experiment with it. We used a big chunk of our time together during Curious Lab to run queries on ChatGPT and compare and contrast the content it generated. Take a look here:
https://chat.openai.com/chat or https://platform.openai.com/playground
Don’t limit yourself to ChatGPT, there is a whole host of AI tools that are worth exploring, our favourites are…
MidJourney —AI art generator
Synthesia — AI video tool
Beautiful.ai – Presentation design