ChatGPT: The Future? or Death by Mediocrity?
ChatGPT is everyone’s new plaything… at least for a couple more weeks.
If you somehow are not familiar with it yet, it is an advanced AI developed by OpenAI, mostly for chat style prompts. And people are blown away by how well it is able to structure its writing…
Neil Hoyne, the Chief Data Officer at Google and author of Converted (10/10 recommend), made this funny last weekend…
I enjoyed this and many of the other screenshots shared across social media. They are fun.
However, many people out there are getting plans to use ChatGPT for content production at scale. And I think that is a recipe for death by mediocrity…
Let’s get some perspective…
It's magic - creating whole website structures, article content, ad copies... it's so useful!
I would say for really good ad copy though there's a bit more creativity involved than what GPT can provide at the moment but it seems to be absolutely crushing it for SEO so far 🤯
Baron Belalov (LinkedIn)
Yay! Another way to crush SEO…. surely Google won’t notice.
I've been messing around with ChatGPT all weekend and think I've figured out how to use it for ad writing and maybe even case studies.
I'm going to set up a little quiz for our team to see if they can tell the difference between the AI assets I generated with input forms and the assets this copywriting firm sent over.
If it works (and it 100% will) I will save my team over £125k per year.
Anonymous (Reddit)
I pray for humanity that his little quiz is a big failure.
A more sober take from one of my favorite thought leaders…
GPT Chat is magical and incredible and amazing, but not especially useful. It's like being able to ask any gifted 15 year old to write about any topic and for them to reply immediately and for free.
Human progress depends on new thinking, new understanding, new ideas, new insights, new discoveries. Not taking what we know, on aggregate and rendering out something based on averages and generalities…
I love technology, I love how it saves time, it offers us a chance to remove drudgery from life and this is all magical incredible tech to be proud of.
But the future shouldn’t be about doing things badly and cheaply and quickly and thoughtlessly at scale but more of precisely the opposite.
All I see from AI for generation is poor quality substance becoming the norm. Lazily outsourcing fact checking and thinking to computers and codifying entrenching existing bias further
Tom Goodwin (LinkedIn)
Thoughtlessly at scale sounds like what social media already is…
Another down-to-earth thought from an article in the Atlantic by Ian Bogost…
First and foremost, ChatGPT lacks the ability to truly understand the complexity of human language and conversation. It is simply trained to generate words based on a given input, but it does not have the ability to truly comprehend the meaning behind those words. This means that any responses it generates are likely to be shallow and lacking in depth and insight.
ChatGPT
Seriously, wtf
That was written by the same ChatGPT who is going to save some British dude £125k?
Most people are cautiously positive about AI and what it could mean for the future.
If you try it out, you will see it successfully structure information fairly accurately… really really fast. It is impressive.
But does will it ignore the customer/reader?
It is impressive compared to other AI, but ChatGPT itself said that it lacks depth and insight.
But does our current internet need another tsunami of irrelevant drivel, or have we covered that already?
What’s your take?
Have you tried ChatGPT, and what did you think?
Any interesting use cases or existential threats?
Let us know what you think…