Is ChatGPT the end of tech copywriters???
Is ChatGPT the end of tech copywriters???
In the first five days from its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT attracted more than a million users. Its enthusiasts say it is a breakthrough in the human to computer communication and announce the end of the writers’ era, its adversaries point out the limitations it has. Who is right? Let’s try to find out.
ChatGPT – what’s the big deal?
For the last three months, ChatGPT – a large language model chatbot created by an American AI company OpenAI – has been one of the most popular Google searches. On LinkedIn, there’s been hardly a day without a new article or post about it.
You may say chatbots are nothing new – you might have come across them when talking to your surgery, insurer, or movie streaming provider. They might have irritated you, as they came up with silly answers to your questions, or they might have helped you finding the right method of restarting your TV when you most needed it. So, what’s the big deal with ChatGPT, you may ask.
Here’s the answer: ChatGPT’s main innovation lies in its ability to generate convincingly human sentences, simulating human’s way of writing. Based on a simple question asked by a user, ChatGPT comes up with an answer, an article, a poem, a story or even a computer programme. It can also develop a meal planner or a song. In fact, there is hardly any form of writing it cannot come up with within just a few seconds. What’s worse, all it produces reads surprisingly well. Like a good piece of journalism, really. Watch out though: it does not provide football games predictions (we tried to get them but failed).
How does ChatGPT work?
ChatGPT is built on a large language model. All large language models work in a very similar way – they use huge amount of data to predict the next word in a string of words, which make their communication seem like if it was created by a human being. In simple terms, it processes all data it was given to come up with unique text based on it.
From the users’ point of view, it’s enough to enter ChatGPT’s website, sign up and ask a question.
Is ChatGPT infallible?
All sounds good, but there are obviously some drawbacks – while ChatGPT is an incredibly useful tool and can have a great impact on the customer service and on writing industry, it has its limitations. The most important of them is its ability to make mistakes. Large language models such as ChatGPT are known for providing false information while making it sound extremely credible. As explained to me by ChatGPT itself, “the information provided by ChatGPT may be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, and should be independently verified”.
Will ChatGPT replace writers and copywriters?
If you are in marketing business, or any other business relying on good and creative content, you are probably asking yourself this very question. Piotr Lemieszek, CEO of Growth Makers, a smart marketing agency that works with both startups and large companies, and constantly looks for new copywriting trends, has been following ChatGPT’s debate very closely:
“I think AI in general, and language tools such as ChatGPT in particular, are great and extremely useful. They can help with customer service and in writing and translating industry. Can they really replace humans? I don’t think so. The technology is not there as yet – currently when you use ChatGPT you need to take into consideration that the text it comes up with may contain serious mistakes and may not have the right level of creativeness. The trick is, ChatGPT comes up only with what was put into it: data, words, sentences, analysis, statistics. It does not create in the way humans do, so if you are after bold journalism, interesting ways of thinking and the most accurate data, real tech copywriters are still the way to go.”
Another interesting point of view comes from ChatGPT itself. We asked it about whether it could replace writers. Here’s what we got as an answer: “No, chatbots like ChatGPT are not the end of writers. While they can assist with tasks such as language generation and data analysis, they do not possess the creativity, insight, and emotional intelligence that human writers possess. Additionally, chatbots are not capable of understanding context or providing the same level of nuance and understanding as human writers. Therefore, chatbots like ChatGPT are tools that can help writers with certain tasks, but they do not replace the role of human writers.”
We don’t want to sound tongue-in-cheek, but it does sum it all up in a very smooth and convincing way, doesn’t it?