Artificial Intelligence Is Here. What’s Next?
Are we approaching the AI singularity, the hypothetical moment when AI exceeds mankind and begins manufacturing robots that look like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Will artificial intelligence become the future of the industry? Will we be able to tell the work of robots apart from our own? Do we need to start discussing android ethics? Is ChatGPT coming for us? Well, that all depends on who you ask.
Some fear that ChatGPT, the AI-powered writing software that launched this past November and created a huge buzz among marketers, could take their jobs. Or worse – make those jobs obsolete. Harvard Business Review calls ChatGPT a genuinely useful “tipping point” for AI. But can’t you detect whether or not a machine wrote a thing? And just how good is this program?
Let’s start by talking about the basics. ChatGPT is a composition software that trawls the internet for information as best it can and then synthesizes it into “human-sounding” prose, all according to user queries. Sometimes the answers are pretty decent; other times, they’re kind of off or even absurd. Humans can guide the work of ChatGPT by offering it feedback for revisions. Especially in subjects where there is plentiful data for the AI to pull from, ChatGPT can do startlingly well, with results that far exceed previous AI generations.
Reactions have been mixed, and reviews for the product range from enamored, inspired, and enthused to suspicious and alarmed. But no matter where you stand on the subject of artificial intelligence versus the brave human resistance, change management professionals will have to reckon with this monumental transformation of industry.
But will ChatGPT really spoil everything and replace us? Or, as we discover more about the nature of human intelligence, will we confidently outpace artificial intelligence and bend it to our will?
Soft skills are important, now more than ever. And good news for introverts: writing well – clearly, empathetically, with the right audience in mind – is still highly valued, and so far AI can’t do that. Here at ADage Marketing Group, we’re already ahead of that particular curve.
Pros and Cons of ChatGPT
Pros of ChatGPT
ChatGPT is trained on a large corpus of text data, leading to accurate and consistent responses.
ChatGPT can generate responses in real-time, making it a fast and efficient tool for various applications.
ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for specific purposes, such as customer support, content creation, and language translation.
Now, is that all a way of insisting that ChatGPT is more than just a way for mischievous students to automate – i.e., cheat – their way through English courses? Maybe. But human morality must be brought to bear on technology, which is not inherently evil or not-evil. Is the fear around ChatGPT really a fear of the product – or of the ways humans might use the product?
Think of this juncture in history as a moment of profound human responsibility. Marketing companies especially should be asking some big questions: How can I ethically employ ChatGPT in my production? How can my copywriters benefit from this new technology? How could it hurt them – and how can I avoid that?
Cons of ChatGPT
Could ChatGPT be sending us into an even dumber future? Certainly, our capacity for memory isn’t what it once was, and technology changes the way we think.
And what about our effect on the way technology thinks? ChatGPT learns from search results, human writing and human response, which means it also learns human error, human misinformation, and even human plagiarism. ChatGPT’s tendency to repeat false information and provide incorrect facts and figures is something fact-checkers and researchers are already worried about. And although the AI isn’t supposed to answer questions about politically fraught topics, with some linguistic legerdemain, the program can be made to pull from and say offensive things.
Moreover, ChatGPT is limited in its understanding of context and can sometimes generate irrelevant or inappropriate responses. Plus, as of this writing, it knows nothing past 2021.
As we look toward a technology- and AI-filled future, some programmers also hypothesize that chatbots and other similar programs might change the way search engines work, which would necessarily change the way we, as marketers, interact with and advertise through them.
The Futurists at ADage Marketing Group Stand Ready!
Overall, ChatGPT is a powerful tool with many benefits, but it is not without its limitations. It is vital that you’re aware of its limitations and use it appropriately - and ethically - within your marketing strategy to get the best results.
As with any major shift in our collective consciousness, the most profound impact that we might see is BETTER QUESTIONS. “The good news is that by asking questions, we naturally improve our emotional intelligence, which in turn makes us better questioners — a virtuous cycle,” they write in the Harvard Business Review. Prompt engineering is going to become the differentiator between organizations that chose to leverage AI. As journalist Warren Berger puts it: “In a time when so much knowledge is all around us, answers are at our fingertips, we need great questions in order to be able to know what to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.”
Is technology good for its own sake? It depends on who you ask. Will it put writers out of work? Not so long as people care that people, not bots, are trying to communicate with them. Will Bing be fired out of irrelevance or championed by the power of Microsoft’s acquisition of ChatGPT? 404 error answer not found.
