Should we be having Black Mirror or Skynet themed nightmares of open source AI platforms making us obsolete overnight?
Who’s The Terminator?
The platform on everyone’s lips right now, is ChatGPT. For those that may not know, or have heard the term banded about with little context - this is an AI-powered chatbot that engages with users in natural language and has the ability to learn from the conversations it has with humans.
The concept of a machine that can instantly generate copy, potential strategy and insight, does understandably strike fear in the hearts of marketers everywhere, especially social media managers who work with high volume content with a need for speed!
So how has the platform been used in real life so far? Here are just a few examples:
Coding: It’s quite handy to have a friend that can read through lines and lines of code in a matter of seconds to find a bug that could take the human eye days.
Education: Universities have been using the GPT software for anything from grammar correction to automating feedback and training.
E-commerce: Online shops, particularly fashion brands, have been known to use GPT-3 to generate product descriptions.
Translation: Even Google themselves have used GPT-2 as a basis for their own translation services that we all use every time you need to know how to say “white wine please” in whatever language they speak at your latest holiday destination.
Copywriting: Yes, we’ve tried to skirt this one, but it has indeed been used for copywriting from generating poems to ad copy and even children’s stories.
Are we seeing AI IRL?
Check out the “mildly terrifying” display of ChatGPT’s ad copy skills in action below.
Ryan is not the only one in awe. Elon Musk described ChatGPT as “scary good”, and journalist Emily Bell takes it to a bit more of a real level by saying it confirms her “greatest fear”, not of job replacement, but of deep fakery and bad actors “smothering reality”.
So is this all the confirmation we need to be hitting the LinkedIn jobs section?
In short, no.
ChatGPT is a promising foundation for the automation of many tasks, but for now it requires a lot of human input and critical editing. Upon opening any chat with the platform you will be greeted with the disclaimer of the limitations it possesses.
In addition to the listed limitations, ChatGPT has not lived, nor can replicate the human experience necessary to breed true creative ideas, strategies and reactive execution. At present this AI platform has no empathy, lateral thinking or ability to understand context or less than face value behaviour, such as deliberate deception.
And to be on the safe side we asked the machine itself. It said it isn’t ready to replace human elements of social media and should remain a tool to help aid creative thinking and solutions. Thanks ChatGPT! We will rest easy until further iterations!
So the machines still work for us, right?
ChatGPT definitely needs more human input and is more likely to threaten templated admin tasks or customer service at a very basic level. In the meantime, we highly recommend a play around with what this platform could do for you. Life in marketing isn’t slowing down and/or getting more manageable, it feels like there is an additional channel, update or legislation change to consider every day! So if there are small parts of your job that can be automated, using a cautious editing eye, why not take that opportunity!