Staying ahead of your competition is crucial in the modern, global marketplace, and one way to do this is to get on board with emerging tech as it suits your business and customers.
There is an enormous buzz around ChatGPT right now. But what is it?
- Is it the golden bullet for businesses, artists, journalists, content creators, students, and everyone else it’s being promoted as? Or is it a potential problem just waiting to fully reveal itself?
- Could it result in current workplace roles becoming irrelevant – literally taking human jobs and even killing authentic human thought and creativity? Or is it a valuable adjunct to improve and transform productivity in human-operated workplaces?
The answers to these questions are not necessarily simple.
Here we explore some of these and discover how you can unlock the potential of ChatGPT for your business…
What is ChatGPT?
The term ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.
It is an AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot that was launched in late 2022 and was developed by the American AI research laboratory OpenAI. It uses natural language processing to generate conversational dialogue that is similar to what humans use.
Users enter prompts and the chatbot composes human-like text, images, or videos for articles, blogs, speeches, social posts, essays, code, artwork, novels, emails, and more. It achieves this by using algorithms to trawl the internet and find specific patterns within data sequences based on the entered prompts through deep learning, predicting text. Generic data is used, and this is tailored by the trained chatbot.
ChatGPT can do everything from drafting emails to composing music, creating artwork, solving maths problems, writing novels, essays or completing examinations, coding, playing games, asking questions, creating titles, and much, much more. The opportunities seem endless.
Able to respond to almost any human prompt, ChatGPT has various applications across a diverse range of business domains, including but not limited to:
- Automation
- Customer Support
- Data Analysis and Insights
- Personalisation
- Collaboration
- Project management
- Social Media Management
- Communications
- Content Creation
- Competitor Analysis
- Feedback
Since its launch less than a year ago, half of US companies have started using ChatGPT and 93%[1] of these intend to expand their use of it in the near future.
You, too, can take advantage of AI for your business! The transformative power of AI holds unprecedented potential for businesses, and ChatGPT is a versatile platform that offers solutions across a wide array of sectors.
You do, however, need to understand its benefits and limitations to determine its suitability for your business – where to use it enthusiastically, where you should tread a little more carefully, and where to avoid it altogether.
How Could Using ChatGPT Benefit Your Business?
ChatGPT can offer diverse possibilities for your business, enabling you to, for example, improve customer support, streamline operations, and generate content.
Some of these potential uses include:
- Automated Customer Service
Customer service chatbots are not new, and ChatGPT enables more advanced customer service and support functions. To save time and maximise efficiency, it can manage enquiries, provide multilingual support, and track customer data at the same time while delivering responses quickly and efficiently.
- Communications
Streamline communications by scheduling, altering, and amending content to suit different channels and mediums – including email, SMS, social posts, blogs, etc. It also allows for moderating and responding to comments and feedback for a consistent presence online. Automated foreign language translators are also beneficial for a lot of business communications.
- Coding
The software industry is discovering the potential for ChatGPT to give help with coding logic, code language translation, debugging, and syntax – these have applications for website product filters, tracking consumer interactions, membership program creation, and more.
- Personal Assistance
From email management to data entry, the app can carry out administrative tasks quickly and efficiently, saving time, money, and effort.
- Time Management
Create schedules, agendas, rosters, and more.
- Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first, essential step in search engine optimisation. While many effective, white-hat SEO activities are performed manually (and must remain so), using ChatGPT for keyword research is a savvy move.
- Meeting Management
Summarise meeting minutes and transcripts, deliver information to remote workers, and much more.
- Content Creation
From writing emails and SMS blasts to website copy, product descriptions, social posts, cold-calling scripts, presentations, and blogs, using AI can help enormously. For example, when writing a blog or article for your business, you may need a bit of a push or inspiration to get started. ChatGPT results can generate content quickly and efficiently – but you do need to understand that this content will require close checking for relevance, context, accuracy, quality, readability, and uniqueness, and will require editing to imbue it with human nuance, voice, personality, and tone. (See limitations below for more on this).
- Market Research
Gather insights, identify consumer trends, analyse competitors, gather feedback, acquire ideas to improve your product or service, understand customer and target market demographics, create customer segments, and more.
What are Some Limitations & Controversies?
- ChatGPT only uses data up to 2021 – it has no knowledge of or access to data or events thereafter. Data used to create content may well be out of date; AI knowledge is limited.
- It doesn’t understand human language complexities, context, or nuances, including irony and sarcasm.
- AI responses lack creativity and depth and may sound unnatural; they are without personality, emotion, or tone.
- It can summarise but does not cite or reference sources.
- Information provided may be incorrect.
- It may focus on the wrong aspect of a prompt and is unable to handle multiple tasks at the same time.
- It requires fine-tuning and is often rife with spelling, syntax, and grammatical errors.
Even its developer OpenAI acknowledges that ChatGPT will sometimes write “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical” answers. It may (and often does) produce repetitive, contradictory, biased, controversial, or discriminatory results, and even at its best, its ability to write content lacks any genuine human insight or nuance. This can be a major issue in terms of quality when used for generating content for human audiences, especially when said content needs to be factually correct, unique, and written in an authentic human voice.
Misinformation with ChatGPT and other AI creators is a growing concern amongst industry leaders. It can also be used to generate malicious content, hate speech, fake news, and cybersecurity risks such as malware. Moreover, there are legitimate concerns regarding plagiarism, privacy, security, and confidentiality with AI.
ChatGPT and SEO
In terms of search engine optimisation (SEO), relying solely on ChatGPT or similar AI tools for SEO content creation will likely do your website (and business) more harm than good.
Differentiation is of paramount importance to successful SEO. Home pages, landing pages, blogs, social posts, and other content must be 100% unique, of high quality, human, non-duplicated, and non-plagiarised. It must also be factually correct, readable, and make sense.
The Google Algorithm can easily flag AI-generated content, as it does plagiarised, repetitive, and low-quality content – and it is continuously getting better at doing so. Your website home and landing pages, blogs, and other text-based offerings must be written for both human and algorithmic audiences to rank, as well as not be penalised by SERP ranking systems.
ChatGPT has its definite advantages and roles to play for businesses.
It is and will remain, however, somewhat controversial and has elicited concern and criticism from academics, researchers, educators, ethicists, journalists, artists, economists, and other advocates, including concerns across industries that it could supplant jobs, influence markets, and “dumb down” everyone from students to audiences. (These concerns are a significant part of the driving force behind the 2023 Writers and Actors Strike in the USA.)
Used appropriately, however, its potential to help you grow your business is unprecedented.
Should You Use It?
Used appropriately and insightfully, with consideration and care, ChatGPT could be incredibly beneficial for your business. It is free to use. The key is to understand how and where to fully avail what it offers versus where and when it just is not going to be the best practice or deliver the results you deserve.
Dot-to-Dot Digital can help you apply ChatGPT properly and to its fullest potential for your business, as well as help you understand where AI tech is suitable and when the human touch is required for the best results. We can also provide that human touch in terms of everything from a clever professional digital marketing strategy and effective SEO campaign to paid ads, high-quality content creation for your website or blog, and much more.
Contact us now to have a chat about your business goals and explore how we can help you in an array of different ways with digital strategies that work.
