Have you heard of ChatGPT? 

It’s the fastest growing web app in the history of the internet. Launched in early December 2022, it took less than 5 days for it to reach 1 million users and analysts are salivating about its earnings potential. It's free to use. There is a paid version (€23 per month), which is recommended if you want to avoid system outages. 

Technically, ChatGPT is an AI language model developed by a research organisation called OpenAI with the goal of promoting and developing friendly AI in a responsible way.  It pretty much knows all of the information on the internet up to 2021, and can generate responses to any questions (or prompts) instantly. By any, I mean any...you can ask ChatGPT for just about anything.

For example - some of my favourites for ChatGPT fun: 

• Ask it to make a meal plan for a week for 2 people wanting to eat less meat who don't like tofu! Boom. You can tell it to remove ingredients, and then ask it to make the shopping list for the plan. All in about 2 minutes flat!
• I spoke to a startup entrepreneur yesterday who told me he used it to write a business plan for his business that he had to submit as part of a competition. He knows his business, but he just didn't want to sit down all night and write down what he does. So he gave ChatGPT some prompts about topics he wanted covered, and then helped the bot iterate until it was right. The whole thing took less than an hour.
• I recently demo'ed ChatGPT at the Showcase Ireland Trade Show. I got someone to time me, then asked ChatGPT to write copy for a beauty brand website, then asked it for keywords for ranking on moisturiser, then asked it for a blog post on one of those keywords, then asked it for ad copy - in 5 variations, with emoji's, then some social media captions, and then to translate all of this into Arabic. The whole thing took 12 minutes!  You can watch me in action here:

Certainly, there are some people who might be afraid of ChatGPT and here are the main reasons why:

1. Job Automation: One of the main concerns people have with AI tools like ChatGPT is job automation. With ChatGPT's ability to generate high-quality content and respond to customer enquiries, some people fear that it may replace human workers. And they are right. I certainly won't be spending my time as a marketer in quite the same way! But I see this as a positive because I can free up my time to do something more creative instead. With the way that social media is going, it's much more reactive and in the moment. For marketers in companies, I see the immediate future as ChatGPT aided long form content, and more time putting the human side of the business out in short form content. 
2. Accuracy and Bias: Another reason why people may be afraid of ChatGPT is its accuracy and potential for bias. Since it's trained on vast amounts of text data, it's possible that the model may pick up and reproduce harmful biases and inaccuracies. I'm more concerned about the bias than the accuracy.  ChatGPT and other generative ai models are in their infancy, so it is up to us to check the work. I see ChatGPT as a generator of about 80% of it, and my role is to check it and add the finessing. The bias in results could be a problem. And it's important to be mindful of this. Just this week in February 2023, the Chief Technology Officer at ChatGPT came out and said now is the time to start having conversations about ethics and regulation in ai.  Makes me feel happier to know that there's a sound woman in charge there and not another Mark Zuckerberg character!
3. Lack of Understanding: I think perhaps the biggest reason why people may be afraid of ChatGPT is simply because they don't understand it. With AI still being a relatively new technology, it can be intimidating and confusing for people who are unfamiliar with it. For some, new equals something to distrust. For others, it's an opportunity. I'm in the latter camp, and I got very excited this second week in February 2023 when Bill Gates came out and said that ChatGPT is a game changer for digital technology in the same way as home computers, graphical user interfaces, and the internet itself!

Since it arrived, I've been busy testing out how to incorporate ChatGPT into my regular digital marketing business. I see three main areas where it can help. By help I mean it literally saves hours of time. I get ChatGPT to create something, then I spend a few minutes editing it.

The areas where it helps me may be summarised as follows:

• Ideation  - planning, analysis of data to inform decision making and content ideas. It's so quick to get inferences from data sets and to ask it to come with new ideas.
• Creation - much has been written already about ChatGPT and blog posts, white papers, case studies, any long form text that needs doing, the smart marketer is dropping it into ChatGPT to get a first version and then making the edits.
• Distribution  - when it comes to paid social, ChatGPT can help with multiple creatives for testing. Am currently running a campaign for a client that has a combination of ChatGPT created copy and my creative. Guess who is winning? 

I've got a digital marketing training course that has been delivered to hundreds of people who want to get the latest tools and tips on how to run digital and social media marketing. What I've done now is to pull out the items we no longer need to do (like learn how to craft a great email subject line) and instead insert ChatGPT prompts that are proven to generate good results.