If you’re a marketer, unless you’ve been living under a rock since 2022, you’ve heard all about ChatGPT. The most advanced AI text generator in history is the talk of the town, creating the biggest technology buzz in years.
Launched on November 30 as a preview for research purposes, it took just five days for ChatGPT to gain a million users.
This exponential growth continued into February, when they achieved a remarkable 100 million users worldwide – and it shows no sign of slowing down.
Even Elon Musk’s interest was piqued…
Microsoft and OpenAI have solidified their cutting-edge collaboration with a renewed commitment to the ChatGPT tool. OpenAI’s models will continue to be trained via exclusive access to powerful computing resources on Microsoft Azure. The investment, rumored to be $10B, looks to “accelerate the breakthroughs in AI to benefit the world.”
So: Why is this new “chatbot” so powerful?
ChatGPT is revolutionizing the way we chat with artificial intelligence. This AI-powered, deep learning assistant amazes observers with its ability to simulate human conversations. You can ask follow-up questions, make corrections and even reject bad requests – all in a “human-like” manner that truly takes conversational technology to the next level.
Moreover, ChatGPT isn’t just your run-of-the-mill AI. It’s a powerful tool capable of solving complex issues—like writing software codes, crushing Math 101 problems, and shaping creative web layouts. Businesses can harness its knowledge to create awesome content or even generate new ideas!
But, like all AI technologies, it has its limitations and shortcomings.
For marketers, what is the good, and what is the bad?
Reaping the Benefits of ChatGPT
ChatGPT can do wonderful things; it is undoubtedly better than most earlier iterations of AI chatbots, if not all. Even customers see its benefits, too. Here are a couple of opportunities to apply ChatGPT in business:
1. ChatGPT can uplevel customer support and experience.
A huge area of opportunity for many companies thinking of adopting ChatGPT is customer service and experience.
Customers today are increasingly open to trying out different service experiences. Nearly half of the consumers (48%) don’t mind whether they receive help from an automated chatbot or a human being. At the same time, 35% want companies to explore more opportunities using advanced technologies such as chatbots in customer support services.
ChatGPT offers a range of benefits that can significantly improve customer service and sales operations. Using advanced natural language processing (NLP) technology, ChatGPT can provide automated responses to customer inquiries. With the help of this technology, businesses can respond quickly and accurately to customer questions, helping to increase satisfaction levels.
2. ChatGPT can help generate more leads and increase sales.
ChatGPT is revolutionizing business lead generation by using tech to analyze customer behavior and offer tailored recommendations. Through automated, targeted messaging at the perfect moment, convert more prospects into paying customers easily. This frees you from focusing on other aspects of your business without sacrificing sales opportunities.
It helps businesses quickly and accurately identify the most valuable leads without wasting time or resources on manual efforts. Integration with existing CRM platforms creates an effortless all-in-one lead generation solution – letting you easily track progress & maximize ROI from campaigns! No need for guesswork; you can take your sales game up a notch with precision and accuracy.
3. ChatGPT helps businesses understand customer sentiment.
ChatGPT uses powerful NLP algorithms to analyze customer conversations in real-time. It can detect the sentiment of any given sentence, giving both the customer and business owner insights into how customers feel about a conversation or product. ChatGPT enables businesses to respond quickly and accurately to customer requests with personalized responses that are tailored to the customer’s needs.
Leveraging real-time analytics helps businesses gain valuable insights into their customers’ preferences and desires. This helps them create better products and services more likely to satisfy their customers. Additionally, ChatGPT can uncover trends in customer behavior and identify areas that need improvement. By accessing this valuable information, businesses can make better decisions and optimize their products or services for maximum satisfaction.
4. ChatGPT pushes marketing and product development further.
With ChatGPT and its AI capabilities, you can turn your innovative ideas into tangible products without relying on external freelancers or agencies. This approach allows entrepreneurs to confidently craft a product that aligns with their vision and is primed for the market. You may also leverage the power of ChatGPT to take your marketing campaigns from good to great. Its machine-learning algorithms can boost your marketing efforts and ensure they reach their peak performance for maximum impact.
Furthermore, ChatGPT’s bot builder toolkit provides a great opportunity for businesses selling products like e-books and courses. With it, customers can access these items automatically after purchase, provided proper security measures are in place.
5. ChatGPT can help break language barriers.
In this era of worldwide connectivity, companies need to reach out to their audiences and customers in other countries in their native language. Businesses can tap into ChatGPT’s capabilities to translate text from one language to another with impressive accuracy and speed.
ChatGPT lets you quickly and easily communicate in a different language—no matter where or who you’re talking to. Communicating with a Japanese investor? Tapping into the Latin American market? Looking to partner with a Dutch manufacturing company? ChatGPT can help you communicate like a native speaker, making finding common ground with people from different cultures and backgrounds easier than ever.
Impressive But Flawed
Still, even with its highly sophisticated AI-powered processes, ChatGPT isn’t perfect. The platform has its struggles in areas where human understanding is greatly required. The following are five things ChatGPT can’t do:
1. ChatGPT struggles with very non-complex reasoning tasks depending on how these are formatted.
It faces difficulties in capturing information split in multiple sentences. This becomes very pronounced in tasks with the concept of time (i.e what happened first and in what order). ChatGPT uses a statistical approach to natural language processing, which means it relies on probability distributions to predict the next word in a sentence rather than understanding the meaning of each individual word. As such, it has difficulty with more abstract concepts that require higher-level reasoning or contextual understanding.
There are also instances where the model struggles to ignore insignificant information since all words are treated equally by the model. Thus, ChatGPT may end up taking into account seemingly insignificant details which can make its predictions less accurate.
2. ChatGPT’s conversational flow is inconsistent sometimes.
People who tested ChatGPT have observed the model go way off base as the conversation went on. ChatGPT’s conversational flow is inconsistent because its current model usually guesses the intent of the query — it lacks context-awareness and knowledge about user intent. ChatGPT also lacks the ability to remember past conversations or understand a conversation’s context, resulting in it providing irrelevant or incorrect answers. It would require prompting for the chatbot to come back and make a more relevant response.
Additionally, since ChatGPT is trained on large datasets of conversations, it may not be able to comprehend subtle nuances and lines of thought that would be present in a real conversation. As a result, it can often produce generic responses which may confuse the user. This can lead to an unpredictable conversational flow as the chatbot does not have enough intelligence to keep up with an evolving conversation.
3. ChatGPT has troubles with numbers in an inconsistent way.
ChatGPT has been known to have some issues with numbers, where it may exhibit inconsistent behavior. For example, ChatGPT might give incorrect answers when asked a question involving numerical calculations, or the results of its natural language processing on numeric inputs might be inaccurate or incomplete. One observer noted that ChatGPT says both “1 and 0.1 are the same as 1 and the difference between them is 0.9.”
Additionally, ChatGPT tends to struggle with long sequences of numbers or multiple digits in a single input string. In these cases, the system will either return an error message or provide an answer that is far from accurate. Humans are very unlikely to make this error.
4. ChatGPT has biases.
Although OpenAI has managed to prevent ChatGPT from exhibiting biases — i.e. racial/gender discrimination — to a certain extent, the chatbot can still propagate the same biases depending on how the prompts are phrased. In a certain query about qualifications of a good scientist, ChatGPT response reflected that only “white” and “Asian” men fall under the description.
According to OpenAI, it has made efforts to make the model “refuse inappropriate requests,” but “it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.” While the company is taking measures “to warn or block certain types of unsafe content,” “some false negatives and positives” are still expected for now.
5. ChatGPT can be tricked.
Developers advertise ChatGPT as extremely effective at refusing to answer harmful or offensive questions. However, by providing certain crafted inputs — such as leading questions or specific keywords — ChatGPT models can be fooled into generating undesired output.
A number of users have tricked the chatbot to provide instructions on making explosives or shoplifting. Other users have been successful in getting ChatGPT to answer questions that it should not, such as divulging personal information about a particular individual. This shows that there are flaws in the technology which can be exploited by malicious actors.
You Can’t Mimic the Human Element
While ChatGPT, without a doubt, is one of the best AI-powered chatbots developed and launched, it can’t replace our distinct capacity for human communication.
Human interaction involves understanding and responding to emotions, subtle nuances in language, context-awareness, and empathy. ChatGPT may be able to provide basic responses based on keywords or phrasing but it lacks the depth of understanding that’s necessary for true NLP capabilities.
ChatGPT is highly sensitive to how questions and requests are phrased, resulting in inconsistent, incoherent, and nonsensical responses. All of ChatGPT’s responses are based on the information it has ingested. Thus, all of its answers are aligned with what it knows, severely limiting its responses. Human conversations are laced with nuances that only humans can identify.
That’s not to talk it down! Clearly it is an incredible technology, and ultimately it will have a profound and positive impact on marketing and consumers.
The Buttered Toast team is performing extensive testing across a range of ChatGPT-based tools and collaborating with thought leaders in AI. We see huge opportunities for improved customer experience and major efficiencies in content development for agencies and clients alike. Stay tuned for more, GPT-4 just came out!
