Since the end of 2022, ChatGPT, which is based on artificial intelligence (AI), has been the talk of the town. Read here how experts believe it can best be utilised in companies, and what risks come with using it.
ChatGPT: what it is and how the program works
The US company OpenAI has developed a chatbot, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which is a language software with artificial intelligence (AI) – achieving a new dimension of technological development. It not only answers all kinds of questions in various languages – answers that are uncannily similar to human reactions – it can also be creative. It can compose songs, write up text from scratch or write programs in various programming languages.
However, ChatGPT only falls back on text which the program has been trained with up to 2021. Therefore, as of January 2023, there are no answers regarding the war in the Ukraine – it simply knows nothing about it. And historically, it is not all-knowing. For instance, there are various public personalities whom ChatGPT has never heard of. At the same time, the program is absolutely able to learn. It analyses the talks it is part of and will become increasingly better over time in giving more realistic answers to questions.
The public has had access to ChatGPT since November 2022. The basic version is free of charge and will remain so – in 2023, an additional paid Plus version will be launched.
ChatGPT for companies: a revolution for marketing?
The application options provided by the chat program are numerous – companies, too, are already testing the opportunities open to them. Conventional chatbots are already in use in the customer service departments at many companies, but non-standardised questions usually overwhelm the programs. This makes the further development of bots that behave even more realistic and human extremely interesting to companies.
On top of that, ChatGPT can boost the efficiency of marketing campaigns – and even turn the entire marketing department completely upside down. According to a survey from Sortlist (German), 51 per cent of the employers questioned who reckon with a reduction of staff would deploy ChatGPT in place of an employee in their marketing and PR department. A total of 43 per cent want to use ChatGPT as a marketing copywriter.
For instance, it is possible that a more advanced bot can create articles on its own for a company blog, based on various sources and in line with an industry. It could be used as inspiration for storytelling, generate social media posts or respond to posts from other users. Its use in email marketing is just as possible as the completely autonomous generation of landing pages for special marketing campaigns. And last but not least, the writing up of product descriptions as well as the translation and transcreation of content into foreign languages takes ChatGPT just a matter of seconds.
Other potential applications within companies
Going beyond customer service and marketing, ChatGPT can be deployed for taking care of many other tasks in a company. An area with huge potential is the analysis of data, figures and statistics which may be under the responsibility of financial accounting staff. Just as possible is its use for training purposes or internal knowledge management and transfer. The bot can also be used for research purposes across departments.
Risks from ChatGPT
ChatGPT is far from being fully mature and comes along with a host of risks. For instance, its answers to questions cannot be unconditionally trusted. References are sometimes wrong or lead to nowhere, the information provided turns out to be fake news in part or have content based on extremist ideas. Experts are also calling out the poor data privacy and gaps in data safety.
