Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has been a hot topic in artificial intelligence (AI) with tech leaders, businesses and individuals putting its ability to the test, asking it to write SEO metadata, compile expert blogs and - our particular favourite - to “create a song in the style of Nick Cave”, to which the artist gave an extremely Nick Cave response.
If you didn’t know, ChatGPT or “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer” is a chatbot that uses “conversational AI application” that allows it to resemble, interpret and synthesise human-like behaviours. Essentially, it can chat to you like a human and it can create writing that looks and sounds like a human wrote it.
Its ability to receive a short prompt and take information from every corner of the internet and transform it - in a matter of seconds - into a long form articles, poems or even a Masters degree paper, has sent copywriters, authors, songwriters, poets and academics into a spin, fearing for their livelihoods.
This is perhaps a little premature. We’ve done some testing ourselves and while it can produce a solid piece of web content that’s really well optimised for SEO, we don’t think it’s got any of the personality that makes Mashbo, well Mashbo. You can read one of the articles yourself here and see what you think.
Unsurprisingly, there has also been a huge clamour to see exactly how Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google equivalent, Bard, will impact how we use the internet, with both tech giants seemingly in an AI arms race, focused on revolutionising search.
We think this might be missing the technology’s real superpower, though. And we certainly don’t think it’s going to make humans obsolete.
Here at Mashbo our strapline is “build things people use”, based on years of watching tech being used for tech’s sake, without clear purpose. Our approach has always been to identify the problem or the desired outcome first, then the tech that can either resolve or deliver it.
Analysing the many ways we’re seeing people use ChatGPT and its counterpoints, we’re not convinced that its value to businesses is in search or even to produce articles and copy quickly, not least because there are still challenges with accuracy, bias and - believe it or not, chatbots becoming infatuated with users!
The real power in AI chat is watching how people use it before parameters for what it is and how it should be used are set.
The technology is a fountain of insight into challenges in your business, as well as a brilliant way to identify productivity issues and how the workplace is changing.
- What tasks are they ‘outsourcing’ to the tech?
- What are they doing with the time they save?
- What is it helping them to do better?
- What impact does this have on the wider business?
Once you have these answers, you can consider what it is that is perhaps slowing down and holding your team back, what it is that is causing low morale and work with software development specialists to decide what could be automated to tackle these problems.
Rather than tech replacing human work, it enhances it or, as highlighted in a recent DigiLeaders Medium blog “automation makes humans superhuman” by combining what machines do best with what humans do best.
This approach isn’t new. For 11 years Mashbo has worked with local, national and international businesses to identify crucial challenges and find the technical solution to resolve them, boosting productivity, profitability and efficiency and creating a better working environment for employees.
If ChatGPT’s explosion onto the scene has generated questions about your business and how automation could help, why not contact us for a chat today?
Email studio@mashbo.com or contact Gavin Sherratt on 0151 708 1924.