OFF-MUTE 🔈
💬 The buzz around ChatGPT is relentless — both the good and bad.
📈 In less than two months, it surpassed 100 million active users;
💰 Microsoft announced a multibillion investment in OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT);
🤖 And Google unveiled its own rival chatbot — an intro that didn’t go particularly well.
🌱 We’re in a new phase of AI growth that will have far-reaching effects across every organization.
🤔 So what does ChatGPT mean for PR and communications? Our East Coast Managing Director, Ed Harrison, describes his experiments and offers his top takeaways:
✍️ Use it to get started. ChatGPT is a research tool. Ed says, “With the right query, it can provide decent industry- and market-background.” He also recommends using it to generate first drafts of formulaic content (think third-tier press releases and prosaic blog posts). The chatbot can save you time and dislodge writer’s block.
🔎 Fact check…everything. The Google Bard misstep was a high-profile failure with a real-world impact. Ed talks about AI “hallucinations” which are confident responses of incorrect or deceptive data that are just plain wrong. The details matter.
💕 Add the human factor. Ed puts it like this: “ChatGPT doesn’t really ‘do’ emotions — it generates text based on input, patterns and associations — by definition, it will soullessly regurgitate what’s already been written, without any true feeling or humanity.” Content can only whir if you deeply understand your audiences and their emotional drivers. It’s fine to lean on ChatGPT as a resource, but don’t become a robot — be a human with real ideas.
🔒 Protect your company’s privacy. AI expert Lance Eliot recently said, “The data that you enter into an AI app is potentially not at all entirely private to you and you alone. It could be that your data is going to be utilized by the AI maker to presumably seek to improve their AI services or might be used by them and/or even their allied partners for a variety of purposes.” For this reason, Ed reminds us that ChatGPT’s utility for public or sensitive information is limited.
⏰ Waste time productively. He’s been using ChatGPT for “creativity breaks” to get his mind going, having it generate everything from historical fiction about the Boston Celtics to a song about his dog written in the style of Bob Dylan. That may or may not help you clear out the mental cobwebs, but it will keep you entertained.
