ChatGPT | Give me some Pros & Cons!
20 January 2023
20 January 2023
You’re all familiar with smart technology, and whether you like it or not, we’re all living amongst robots in 2023. Whether it be your smart speakers, smart heating systems in your home or the latest on the market for all things AI copywriting, ChatGPT. Technology is getting smarter and learning more with every day, and no – not to take over the world – but to drive efficiencies in everyday activities.
So, what is ChatGPT?
At its most basic level, ChatGPT is a tool that allows an AI robot to write copy for you. All you need to do is type in instructions or some context to what you need, and the bot does the rest. Typing in front of you everything from poems to advert descriptions to lists.
“It’s what the machine-learning crowd call a large language model(LLM) that has been augmented with a conversational interface. The underlying model has been trained on hundreds of terabytes of text, most of it probably scraped from the web, so you could say that it has “read” (or at any rate ingested) almost everything that has ever been published online.
As a result, ChatGPT is pretty adept at mimicking human language, a facility that has encouraged many of its users to anthropomorphism, i.e. viewing the system as more human-like than machine-like.” (The Guardian)
As long as you give it clear instructions, it can do the rest… well, can it?
As with all AI tools, the longer they run the better and more refined they get. And ultimately ChatGPT is still very new – it broke onto the social scene in 2022 and is currently free for the public to use. But it is still very much free, because it’s in BETA testing phases. Which brings us to our first pro:
The use of ChatGPT is currently free during the “research preview” time.
The chatbot is currently open for users to try out and provide feedback on the responses so that the AI can become better at answering questions and to learn from its mistakes. And who doesn’t like free stuff? However, this excellent pro is also one of the key cons we found while testing the platform. It’s so popular due to the free-ness, that it can be hard to use when you need it:
While in the cons section below, you’ll see a few – there is a key reason even while its learning, it’s worth using, and that is TIME. Copywriting can be a slow process, whether it be technical or creative writing, but there can also be long research phases before writing a piece of copy or making a presentation. ChatGPT can bridge an essential gap in 2023 and drive time efficiencies. As our Head of SEO says of the platform: ‘Ultimately, in our business, time is money. It might not get me to my destination with a slick and complete piece of copy, but it will help reduce the time I spend on the journey. So, I’m enjoying testing it out!’
For example, if you need to write a blog on the tourism market in Belfast and you want to know the 5 best places to visit in the city; you can type into ChatGPT –
‘What are the 5 best places to visit in Belfast’.
Now, you might not like the way they describe the top 5 places on the ChatGPT list, but within seconds you got a list of 5 places to visit. Suddenly your time is used on refining and polishing the copy (no doubt, what you do best?) and the engine helped you make that destination (travel pun intended).
ChatGPT is specifically programmed not to provide toxic or harmful responses. So, it will avoid answering those kinds of questions… which sounds fair, right?
As stated above, the reason ChatGPT’s popularity has soared in recent months is because it’s free, and that brings us to our first con:
Great for OpenAI and getting the required testing they need, not so good for those trying to use it and test it for their own needs. Not only can it stop you from getting in when its being used too much globally, sometimes you can be in the platform and not get any results because of ‘exceptionally high demand’.
It’s hard being so popular!
An important limitation of ChatGPT is that the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input. In other words, expert directions (prompts) generate better answers.
Yes, that’s right, the saying your parents used on you when you were at school; ‘you get out what you put in’, is literally staring us in the face. The bot requires clear, concise, and basic language with a clear purpose, to give you the most focussed answers. For example, if you want to write a poem about Obama (and who doesn’t?), rather than say ‘write me a great poem about Obama’ to ensure it understands and gives you the right content; it would be better to say, ‘write a poem about Barack Obama’. The clearer, the better.
Another limitation is that because it’s trained to provide answers that feel right to humans, the answers can trick humans that the output is correct. Oh the irony! ‘Many users discovered that ChatGPT can provide incorrect answers, including some that are wildly incorrect.’ (Search Engine Journal)
OpenAI said the following about this:
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
Fixing this issue is challenging, as:
(1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth;
(2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and
(3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”
Time will tell how this platform develops, and with the likes of Ryan Reynolds using his global network to discuss it… no wonder 9 times out of 10 you won’t be able to use it due to over-popularity.
But what we do know is, AI is here to stay, the bots are getting smarter, and anything that drives time efficiencies is an asset in our industry!
Loud Mouth Media have a specialist team of SEO experts, if you need advice on how best to approach your SEO strategy in 2023 – get in touch with our team, here.
