If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet in recent weeks, you’ve heard of ChatGPT.
You’ve probably seen it featured in memes, headlines, or even your Facebook group chat.
But, you may not know what it is.
Don’t worry. Today we’re going to fill you in on what ChatGPT is, exactly. Plus, we’ll share seven ways it can help you with your marketing.
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What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a text-based, AI-powered chatbot that was launched by OpenAI in late 2022. (OpenAI is the same company behind DALL·E, an AI that creates original art and images from text-based prompts.) Like other chatbots, ChatGPT functions in a conversational way, using a dialogue format to interact with the user and provide text-based answers.
What makes the AI chatbot so impressive is the human-like content it is able to produce, and the way it can iterate on and refine its previous answers based on new queries from the user.
ChatGPT was developed with truly massive amounts of data to be able to predict what word should come next in a sentence. This makes it a large language model (LLM), and it’s what enables ChatGPT to create such human-like content — from sentences to paragraphs to pages and even college essays.
Also, ChatGPT is trained to get smarter with every interaction, thanks to Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, or RLHF. That’s techspeak for using human feedback to get better at answering queries and creating even better content.
Today, people are using ChatGPT for all sorts of imaginable purposes, from helping them prepare for job interviews to writing screenplays. When you open up ChatGPT, it gives you examples of what it can do:
If we ask, “Got any creative ideas for a 10 year old’s birthday?,” ChatGPT responds:
You can then ask ChatGPT to generate a new response, or ask followup questions, like “Can you go into more detail on each idea?”
As you can see, this simple example shows how powerful ChatGPT really is.
Are there any limitations to ChatGPT?
In a word, yes. For one, the chatbot was trained not to respond to dangerous or explicit questions.
Also, its knowledge is limited. ChatGPT creates content based on a static set of data that was uploaded in 2021, so the AI doesn’t know about anything that happened after that date. As a result, it’s possible for ChatGPT to write something that sounds good, but is essentially incorrect. So, you’ll want to fact check its work.
Here’s a particularly egregious example from a Twitter thread:
Even when it writes accurately, ChatGPT isn’t the best writer in the world. Even its creator OpenAI acknowledges that ChatGPT “is often excessively verbose and overuses certain phrases.” You’ll want a pair of human eyes to review any content created using ChatGPT.
Finally, Google says it views automatically generated content created using AI-powered tools like ChatGPT as “spam.” And, watermarking may be introduced in the future to prevent plagiarism.
Ways to use ChatGPT as a marketer
Even with the caveats we listed above, ChatGPT can help your marketing in a number of ways. Here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Craft article outlines. While you’ll want to avoid using ChatGPT to create original content, you can ask it to create outlines for your articles, saving you time and effort.
- Perform keyword research. Upload a list of keywords and ask ChatGPT to offer synonyms to find similar keywords. Similarly, you can ask ChatGPT to tell you about “related questions regarding [your topic]” to replicate the People Also Ask section of Google — and boost your chances of earning a featured snippet.
- Write code. ChatGPT is totally capable of writing basic coding commands and scripts.
- Translate text into other languages. You’ll still want a human to review these before you publish them, but ChatGPT can save you some of the time and cost of using a translator.
- Create article summaries. You can upload a finished article and ask ChatGPT to provide a summary to include at the top.
- Write meta descriptions. Along the same lines, you can ask ChatGPT to provide one-to-two sentence meta descriptions based on an article you upload.
- Beat writer’s block. If you’re having trouble getting started on an article, meeting agenda, or even an email, you can ask ChatGPT to help you out. Then, you can edit and revise what the bot wrote, or feel inspired to craft your own now that you have something to respond to.
ChatGPT is an impressive tool that can supercharge your marketing when used right, or get you into hot water if used wrong. Let the experts at Your Marketing People guide you. Contact us today to learn how we can take your marketing to new heights.
