Feature
The AI-driven ChatGPT chatbot has been causing leaders across industries to take notice of what many believe to be the most humanlike AI chat interface developed to date. With a chatbot that is capable of producing content and conversations that are extremely humanlike, there are implications that are far-reaching, with potential applications in marketing, sales, customer service, search and content production.
The Marketing and Customer Service Implications of ChatGPT
ChatGPT is a natural language processing (NLP) technology developed by OpenAI that allows users to have conversational interactions with a machine. This technology has the potential to be used for marketing in a variety of ways. For example, businesses could use ChatGPT to create chatbots that can answer customer questions and provide information about products or services. This could help to improve the customer experience by providing quick and convenient access to information.
ChatGPT could also be used to generate personalized content for marketing campaigns, such as tailored emails or social media posts. This could help to improve the relevance and effectiveness of marketing messages by delivering content that is tailored to the interests and preferences of individual customers. Additionally, ChatGPT could be used to analyze customer feedback and identify patterns and trends that can inform marketing strategy and decision-making. Overall, ChatGPT has the potential to be a valuable tool for businesses looking to improve their marketing efforts.
The two paragraphs above were written entirely by ChatGPT. This is illustrative of just how impressive OpenAI's work has become, and indicative of the potential uses of this technology.
Related Article: OpenAI's New ChatGPT Might Be the First Good Chatbot
ChatGPT in the News
Since the announcement of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, there has been a slew of news articles about the new AI technology and its implications.
Here is CMSWire's coverage:
- Why Google Missed the ChatGPT Boat
- OpenAI's New ChatGPT Might Be the First Good Chatbot
- ChatGPT Shares Its Thoughts on Enterprise VoC Programs
- We Asked ChatGPT 3 Customer Experience Questions. Here's How It Responded
And here is some of what's happening outside of CMSWire:
- How ChatGPT could disrupt the business of search
- The New Chatbots Could Change the World. Can You Trust Them?
- Is ChatGPT a ‘virus that has been released into the wild’?
- AI bot ChatGPT writes smart essays — should professors worry?
- How Google Got Smoked by ChatGPT
- Is ChatGPT the next big threat to Google’s dominance in the AI market?
- Will ChatGPT make lawyers obsolete? (Hint: be afraid)
The reason that ChatGPT has garnered so much attention when other chatbots did not lies in its ability to answer practically any question with well-written, seemingly authoritative answers. Additionally, the GPT-3.5 technology that the chatbot is based on has continued to evolve. GPT-4 will potentially be released in 2023 and promises even greater advancements:
Some of the new functionality that is expected to be presented in GPT-4 include:
- Increased capacity, which allows it to process and generate more complex and detailed text.
- Improved language generation, which will facilitate the creation of more humanlike language and a better understanding of the context and intent of the text it generates.
- Enhanced multitasking abilities, which will enable it to handle multiple tasks and subtasks simultaneously and to switch between them seamlessly.
- Improved explainability, which will make it easier to understand how it makes decisions and generates text.
What Exactly Does the GPT in ChatGPT Stand For?
The GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pretrained Transformer and refers to the underlying technology that powers ChatGPT, which is a type of machine learning (ML) model called a transformer. ChatGPT uses this technology to generate natural language responses to user input and has been trained on a large dataset of text to improve its performance.
The generative and pretrained aspects of the model refer to its ability to generate new text based on the input it has been provided with, and that it has been trained on a very large dataset. Although OpenAI has not publicly stated what kind of dataset ChatGPT was trained on, language models such as GPT are typically trained on large amounts of data that include books, articles and other written works, which allows them to better understand the patterns and structures of human language. The specific dataset that was used to train ChatGPT is likely to have been selected and curated by OpenAI to optimize the chatbot’s performance.
ChatGPT is not able to access the internet or go beyond the data set that it was trained on, unlike other AI technologies such as Amazon’s Alexa, which is able to access the internet in order to respond to questions.
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Related Article: We Asked ChatGPT 3 Customer Experience Questions. Here's How It Responded
The Limitations of ChatGPT
Pieter Buteneers, director of engineering in ML and AI at Sinch, a customer engagement platform provider, told CMSWire that ChatGPT will answer basically any question one could ask of it, from common trivia questions to even finding and fixing bugs in provided code, but while it is immensely powerful, it has a couple of major flaws.
“First, ChatGPT cannot specifically search an internal knowledge base or the internet for an answer; it can only reproduce what it has learned from reading the internet,” said Buteneers. “Second, ChatGPT will always respond to your question, even if it is unsure if it is correct or not.” Buteneers said that no matter what, the chatbot will come up with a grammatically correct answer that could fool an outsider, even if it may prove to be complete nonsense to those with domain knowledge.
This doesn’t mean that ChatGPT does not have potential uses for marketing, sales or content generation. The key lies in using the technology in combination with other AI technologies. “There are other existing AI models with capabilities that, combined with ChatGPT, could significantly enhance its viability. Models that can search a knowledge base for answers to questions or flaws and show you where they found that answer, are already in production today; it is just a matter of combining the wit of language models like ChatGPT with the search capabilities and reference links that other knowledge-base search engines can provide,” said Buteneers.
The humanlike qualities of the conversations that ChatGPT is able to generate have huge potential to “humanize” otherwise dry, mechanical interactions between people and machines. “Once these problems are solved, language models could be used, for example, as trusted first-line customer support agents with 24/7, instantaneous availability,” said Buteneers. “As such, any company that delivers some form of customer support can benefit from a model like this, as long as they have a well-documented knowledge base the model can learn and draw from.”
When ChatGPT was asked about its own limitations, the AI bot reiterated that as with any technology, there are limitations to ChatGPT. “One limitation is that ChatGPT is only as good as the data it is trained on. This means that if the training data is biased or incomplete, the results produced by ChatGPT may also be biased or incomplete,” replied the chatbot. “Additionally, ChatGPT is not perfect at understanding natural language, and may sometimes produce unexpected or inaccurate responses to certain inputs.”
ChatGPT is not an application that can be run on a typical computer. As such, it’s not likely to become available as a Microsoft Windows app, and will probably continue to be a cloud-based SaaS. “Another limitation of ChatGPT is that it is a large and complex system, and requires a lot of computational resources to run. This means that it may not be practical or cost-effective to use ChatGPT in all situations,” explained the bot. The chatbot concluded by reiterating that ChatGPT is a machine learning technology, which means that it can only learn and improve based on the data it is given. “This means that it may not be able to adapt to new situations or scenarios that it has not been trained on.”
Related Article: ChatGPT Shares Its Thoughts on Enterprise VoC Programs
Final Thoughts on ChatGPT
Conversation AI has been an evolving technology that is already in use by many brands as part of their customer service and call center initiatives. ChatGPT promises to have even greater implications for businesses and society in general, with applications in customer service, marketing, sales, search, knowledge bases and content generation.
