Will ChatGPT Take All Of Our Jobs?

Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI innovation, where human interaction and technology seamlessly converge to shape the fascinating trajectory of ChatGPT's future. As we stand at the crossroads of artificial intelligence and natural language understanding, the potential of ChatGPT to revolutionize communication, problem-solving, and creativity appears boundless.

The above paragraph was written by ChatGPT itself (surprise) when I asked it to “write an introduction for a blog on the future of ChatGPT!” - I was going to ask it if it was going to come after all of our jobs but got a bit paranoid and felt this softer approach was the safer option. Much like Covid19, ChatGPT seemed to come out of nowhere and spread just as quick! It now has people in marketing, publishing, education and wider professions rushing to use it while claiming that our world as we know it is about to change!

But should we be worried? Is this just the latest internet tool to make our lives that little bit easier? Or will it eliminate the need to employ talented humans when there is a free ready-made consultant, resident expert on *insert topic* and strategist only a few clicks away? With similar ArtAI, VideoAI and PhotoAI platforms now being rolled out, it’s clear that AI will be a flashpoint in the coming years with huge implications for creativity, intellectual property and copyright laws also.

As we’re still in the infancy of a potential AI Era, here’s my own personal experience and thoughts on ChatGPT through my use of it in my marketing role. There’s already hundreds of so called ChatGPT gurus on social media already, so I’ll also draw on some of their observations to see if we really are heading to a Terminator style apocalypse.

What is ChatGPT?

According to the OpenAI website, they introduce the tool as a “model which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit it’s mistakes, challenge incorrect premises and reject inappropriate requests”. What this translates to for marketeers in particular, is a tool that can crawl the web to deliver copywriting, blogs, ad copy, strategy, market research and more.

As a marketeer with over 8 years’ experience, I’m always cynical of the latest tool, software or magic pill that will automate X, result in Y and essentially streamline both my own role and wider business operations. These tools usually come attached to a sales company, a friendly account manager and multiple demos before a long training induction and internal roadmap.

What makes ChatGPT and similar OpenAI platforms different, is that they’ve come out of nowhere and are free to use (for now) in the same way that Google is. When I say free I mean you still have to at least sign up with your email and register before agreeing to their terms. There’s also an option to buy the premium version (naturally) which is $20p/m and includes a more powerful version with even faster response times.

It's Very Impressive

So what is it like to use? Well after playing around with the tool, you can’t help but be impressed. It’s the speed at which it delivers on your requests that makes it hard to fathom just how it works. It’s simple and dynamic in the way that you can ask it to delve deeper into certain elements of its answer, rewrite parts more succinctly or even take a different approach to your current problem.

Parts of its responses sometimes come across as robotic or don’t flow in the way something that’s generated by a human would, but the quality of these responses usually give a good basis for whatever it is you need to produce. Having worked in many social media focused roles, a simple example of a test request I gave the tool was to “Devise a Social Media Strategy for a Luxury Jewellery Brand”

The above image shows just the first three steps of a twelve step strategy that does cover all of the key best practices that social media managers would use. It also uses data to suggest the most effective platforms to leverage (in this case Pinterest). It then notes the key considerations like luxury being tied into exclusivity, the need for educational content on product features and the importance of community management and reviews.

This is all great information, but in reality this would just work as a roadmap or reference point for a social media manager or team to execute. It’s like researching the latest studies or receiving the latest best practices/algorithm update from a Facebook Business Newsletter. The data itself is useless, if you don’t have the humans to deliver on it.

It’s All In The Prompts

Questions are one thing, but where things start to get really interesting with ChatGPT is when you learn how to give the tool better “prompts”. More specific prompts will start to deliver you more specific and niche outcomes. There are already AI Gurus online who will give you the ultimate template or tricks or tips to get the best from this new technology. So lets put these to the test.

To take my earlier question, if I was to elaborate on this and give it the following prompt - “create a content strategy to promote luxury lab-grown diamond jewellery to a millennial audience”, ChatGPT will deliver an answer that focuses more on transparency, lab-grown technology, environmental impacts, personalisation and other content that aligns with millennial specific values. You can then ask the tool to explain the positives associated with lab-grown jewelry (American spelling is needed here) to this specific audience in a short way. What you’ll receive is something like the below…

So really when asking the tool for what you want, your prompt needs to give it the context, as much accurate information as you can, what this information will be used for and the level of detail you want. Once you begin to consider these before asking the questions, you start to see the potential power of it. Still not happy with the result? Then ask it follow up questions. You’ll then start to build out the use case for it in your own company, career or profession.

The Verdict

Above are just simple examples of how it can be used effectively in marketing. My own verdict is that I imagine every large and small tech company in the world is either already using the tool or is considering using it in the future. Once they do I think that for now at least, it will be something that people keep available in the background as an additional resource. It reminds me of a friend of mine who knew a lad who bought a tazer gun and when asked why he said “because it’s better to have it and not need it, then need it and not have it”

Initial usage will be more to support teams and be another “brain” in the strategy meeting. So far, it also seems to be devoid of any real humour or personality and when you prompt it for anything too creative, it will fire back something that just doesn’t seem right. So for the true creative genius’ out there, you’ll be safe for now.

Ironically, I can see companies spending the next few years actually hiring AI experts and consultants to review the ways in which this new technology can streamline their operations. Before these “experts” will be no longer needed once the tool has had enough effective prompts to do it all independently.

I might be romantic and so like to think that human creativity, interaction and productivity will always be valued over the technological tools that aim to mimic this. However, the landscape of work has changed a lot since 2020. With many people now working partly or completely remotely, the face to face element of work and the value placed on these personal interactions and collaborations have diminished in my opinion.

This provides the perfect backdrop for these tools to be welcomed with open arms by many. Companies looking to save costs, will use them to inform their activities instead of bringing in new hires. Businesses outsourcing work to agencies will have this work sub-outsourced to AI-gencies (think I should trademark that) and few will even notice. There is hope though as there’s already reports of ChatGPT itself experiencing fatigue due to its workload. So maybe it’s already a lot more human than we think…