Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has garnered significant public interest and has created waves among the content creator fraternity. So, it is highly likely that you have come across it on social media or otherwise. Its popularity has further been elevated due to brands openly associating themselves with it.
For example, BuzzFeed recently announced that they are going to use ChatGPT for their quiz and other content sections. This comes on the heels of their announcing a layoff a few days before.
The development makes BuzzFeed one of the latest in the flurry of digital publishers to embrace AI (artificial intelligence) for their content creation endeavors. With ChatGPT’s share price continuing to soar since the announcement, it is evident that the market has welcomed the move with both hands.
We have seen this in the past, too, with many AI technologies and tools gaining massive attention in a short period but soon losing their spark. Will the ChatGPT trend play out the same way, or does this new AI kid in the block have enough to replace human writers?
Irrespective of the outcome, we have to accept that ChatGPT is currently the most sought-after content creation tool, not only among marketers but also among the general public. This tool has afforded us a glimpse into the possible arrival of a new era of AI technologies that can possibly reshape our lives in the coming years.
This article discusses the origin of ChatGPT and how it works. It is a part of a series on ChatGPT where we try to decode its future impact by breaking down its technology, pitting its potential against human creators, and figuring out how we can use it to augment our content output.
Here is a deep dive into the topic to understand what comes after ChatGPT.
What is ChatGPT, and how does it work?
In simple words, ChatGPT is an AI-based chatbot model that uses NLP (natural language processing) to generate answers to the questions asked of it. Its creators have tried to emulate human engagement and create an interface similar to how you converse with humans.
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based AI company. OpenAI is also renowned for its other products, namely DALL-E, an AI-powered image and art generator, and Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system. Headed by Sam Altman, who previously was the president of Y Combinator, the company released ChatGPT for public use on November 30, 2022.
Microsoft has also had a major role in the development of ChatGPT and is a partner and investor with an investment value of USD 1 billion dollars.
Also, read: Using ChatGPT To Support Your SEO Efforts
How does ChatGPT work?
Let’s take a keener look at the gears behind the technology. ChatGPT is based on LLM (Large Learning Model) and GPT-3.5. LLMs are AI-based models capable of encapsulating significantly more data than their preceding generations. These models are a major AI breakthrough and are capable of using learned knowledge to transform and revamp AI-based output.
In usual cases, chatbots are trained with a limited dataset and are only capable of answering specific questions or performing certain tasks. But by leveraging LLM, ChatGPT can encompass a much wider range of datasets because it uses an astounding 175 billion parameters combined with 570 gigabytes of text data.
But LLMs are limited as they are incapable of always understanding what a human wants and can cause misalignment. To help minimize the shortcoming, its creators built GPT-3.5, which combines a smaller version of GPT-3 with the RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) model.
To bring ChatGPT as close as possible to human behavioral tendencies, the technology integrates human feedback in the training loop to get rid of untruthful, biased, and/or harmful outputs that AI may otherwise generate. In addition, the AI was continuously given feedback to refine its results and bring it closer to what an average human creator can produce.
This training is seen to significantly help AI models understand and mimic human behavior. It is also why you may find it difficult to distinguish ChatGPT’s results from an average human writer.
In addition, the bot can also explain, remember previous conversations, elaborate on a particular topic, and apologize when it feels the need to. These features have helped it rake up tremendous public interest, deservedly.
The tool can be used for myriad applications, ranging from short-form and long-form content to web development and storytelling. Here are some of the most popular ChatGPT use cases:
- Suggesting answers to a particular question.
- Behaving like a chatbot or a virtual assistant and having conversations with a user.
- Suggesting content ideas based on keywords or topics.
- Helping users in marketing by creating long-form content, such as articles or blog posts, or short-form content, such as social media copy.
- Having personalized communication, such as product recommendations.
- Creating email templates for cold emailing.
- Translating the text from one language to another.
- Generating codes for web development.
- Creating a summary from the inputted text.
There is no doubt that ChatGPT has brought a wave that gives us some insight into what tomorrow’s content creation world will look like. But the picture remains incomplete, and there are several possibilities for where we may head.
Top 5 predictions for the world after ChatGPT
With the incursion of ChatGPT and other AI-driven tools, it would be safe to assume that AI will certainly play a major role in the future of content and content marketing. But how exactly? Let us try and break down the potential scenarios.
Here are our top five predictions for the world post the democratization of ChatGPT based on GPT-3.5:
Content marketing folks will harness the power of AI
Modern marketers depend on technology and AI for almost all the stages of their process. From lead generation, interactions, and conversions to content creation and optimization, AI-powered tools have brought about a massive change in a content marketer’s role.
The industry, expected to rake in revenue of over USD 135 billion by 2026, only had 29% of the leaders using AI back in 2018. This section grew almost 3x in the next two years to 84% by 2020, and the numbers continue to rise.
If we take a deep dive, it is not very hard to understand the stupendous growth. Today, there are AI tools for almost all content marketing processes. Consider these examples:
- Scalenut for content ideation and content creation.
- Grammarly and ProWritingAid for AI-based writing improvements.
- Chatbots for managing human interactions.
- Optimail for A/B testing of emails.
- Ahrefs and Semrush for AI-based site audits and performance tracking.
- Acrolinx for evaluating text according to brand standards for unified messaging.
So, with the many tools in play, will content marketing be automated from end to end? We can safely declare that it is unlikely to get completely automated anytime soon, but capable marketers can harness AI’s prowess to reduce their workloads significantly.
For instance, a team responsible for content ideation and creation can use Scalenut for AI-powered ideation and creation. They can take the help of Scalenut’s 40+ AI-powered templates to streamline their short-form content needs.
Further, when the need for long-form content, including blog posts and articles, arises, content creators can use Scalenut’s Cruise Mode (a 5-minute SEO blog writer) to leverage AI’s potential and churn out a first draft within minutes. This way, most of the research and writing is outsourced to AI, significantly improving the time taken for content creation, and marketers can focus more on higher-value tasks.
As more and more marketers and brands adopt AI-powered tools, the shift would be towards creating fact-based content that is personalized and curated with the target audience in mind.
The focus would then shift to hiring personnel, such as writers, editors, and marketers, who can infuse their personal/the brand’s POV in the message they forward to the end customer. While AI can also undertake personalization, its current capabilities are no match to human beings’ ability to infuse a unique POV or other differentiating factors.
These developments will drive marketers to hire writers who understand AI-driven tools’ shortcomings and can fill the gaps to help produce well-rounded content consistently. The ability to add emotions and a unique angle would, therefore, be quintessential and will drive marketers’ hiring endeavors in the coming days.
AI will revolutionize the SEO research
Research is one of the most time-consuming tasks for content marketers. It was also the main reason that propelled companies with more resources to steer ahead for advanced technologies. AI for SEO is something that can democratize the research part and help even those with limited resources stand out and get to their goals easily.
Here are the words of Mark Traphagen of seoClarity on the role of AI SEO:
“A decade ago, the best SEOs were great excel jockeys, downloading and correlating data from different sources and parts of the SEO lifecycle, all by hand.If SEOs were doing that today, they’d be left in the dust.By the time humans can process – results have changed, algorithms updated, SERPs shifted, etc.And that’s not to mention the access and depth of data available in this decade, fast-paced changes in search engine algorithms, varying ranking factors that are different for every query, intent-based results that change seasonally, and the immense complexity of modern enterprise websites.These realities have made utilizing AI now essential at the enterprise level.”
In addition, SEO experts and content marketers can also use AI for content strategy and performing a plethora of tasks, such as keyword analysis, cluster strategy, intent discovery, and more.
For example, Scalenut’s Topic Clusters Generator lets users generate a range of blog ideas surrounding a keyword. The tool can help with comprehensive and smart content planning as it uses AI to analyze thousands of keywords based on your input.
You can filter your search based on location, cluster them, and create relevant topic suggestions to encapsulate them all at once and use them to target the right audience. This way, AI tools will ensure you are no longer aiming in the dark and instead have a robust SEO strategy to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Additionally, Scalenut’s Content Optimizer tool shows where your content stands against the competition by pitting them on nine unique criteria. It will return an average score out of 100, along with the highest score of the top-ranking page for the chosen keyword. Additionally, you can expand the report to get specific SEO recommendations for each criterion and optimize your content for the search engine.
Also, read: Scalenut AI vs ChatGPT: Which One Is Better For Content Marketing Team?
The way people consume content will change
A few days ago, Sciences Po, one of France’s top universities, announced the ban on ChatGPT’s usage. They cited that they were wary of fraud and plagiarism and have communicated to all students and faculty to stop using ChatGPT with immediate effect.
A certain degree of caution is definitely advisable in these early days of AI advancement. AI tools rely on data and algorithms for output generation, and if the content is passed unchecked, there are high chances of the tool getting the tone wrong. In essence, most AI tools are good for clearly delineated topics, but gray areas pose a concern.
With the growth of AI tools and AI-generated content, people have also started becoming wary of the kind of content they are consuming. Instead of accepting whatever is served to them, they are looking to verify the facts via multiple sources before accepting them.
Modern readers have started inclining towards creators and sources offering a unique POV combined with insightful content, which not only clearly mentions the information source but uses analogies to set a unique tone.
Furthermore, Google’s Helpful Content update clearly states that the search engine will devalue AI-generated content and can end up flagging content that lacks value-addition and personalization. This move from one of the biggest search engines proves that the audience is no longer solely interested in AI-generated content.
The inclination of end users to connect with those who offer a unique POV has started giving rise to a new age of content creators who don’t rely completely on AI. These creators will understand how to make AI work for them and use it to optimize their processes and strengthen their research capabilities.
Also, read: Uncovering AI detectors - Here is what we found
A dawn of new search engine
With ChatGPT’s rise, a section of internet users started believing that search engines would soon become irrelevant. But as the technology moves forward in the testing phase, we have come to realize that the OpenAI innovation is unlikely to lead to the downfall of search engines.
Several search engine brands are already planning to release their version of ChatGPT. For example, Microsoft has laid down plans to integrate Bing with ChatGPT to ensure it returns more than just a set of links, which can pose a challenge to Google. Google also released its ChatGPT competitor, though the initial results are far from usable.
One of the major reasons why many considered ChatGPT replacing search engines was the latter’s limitation of only being able to return links to articles (which can be manipulated using SEO). Further, it also returns ads often that are irrelevant and frustrate users.
In comparison, ChatGPT uses a more friendly dialogue-like format to return more concrete answers to the user. But it is not without its limitations. It often returns only surface-level information or results that may sound plausible but are factually incorrect or do not make enough sense.
However, we can probably see more and more people using ChatGPT to gain a place in Google’s Snippets section. This would allow them to create results that are more likely to gain customers’ attention and propel them to expand the link to know more.
Another distant possibility is users using ChatGPT to answer some specific questions and resorting to search engines for other things. That way, ChatGPT would be able to ensure a more interactive and engaging search engine experience. But ChatGPT is unlikely to kill search engines and is instead likely to orchestrate a new dawn for them, a glimpse of which we have already started to see.
Lastly, no, SEO and content marketing jobs will not dissipate
We asked ChatGPT ourselves if it would take human jobs away. Here is its response:
"ChatGPT and other language models like it have the potential to automate certain tasks that involve natural language processing, such as customer service, data entry, and content generation. However, it's important to note that language models like ChatGPT are not designed to replace human jobs but rather to assist and augment them. They can help humans to improve the efficiency and accuracy of their tasks. Additionally, AI development and deployment also require human roles, such as data scientists, engineers, and researchers."
Also, read: Can ChatGPT beat our content team?
If we look at the past, tools like Figma did not kill the role of graphic designing. Nor did Google end the relevance of physical libraries. Yes, ChatGPT may render a certain section of creators useless and can affect the work that flows to them.
However, it is unlikely to displace the entire community of creators and specialists. There can be a shift in the tasks you are required to perform for a specific role, but those who would be able to use AI are more likely to rise up the ranks instead of getting laid off.
In the words of ChatGPT -
"Humans should not be scared of ChatGPT or other AI systems. These systems are designed to assist and augment human capabilities, not to replace them. While ChatGPT and other AI systems have the potential to automate certain tasks and make certain jobs obsolete, it is important to consider how the implementation of AI can be done in a way that is beneficial for both businesses and workers."
Wrap up
ChatGPT is a revolutionary product and will lead to a rise in several innovative products, some of which are already announced, such as Azure and smart chatbots. While AI has already started establishing a place for itself across industries, the arrival of ChatGPT can lead to a hastened acceptance with more and more people willing to use it for their benefit.
Those who are not convinced about ChatGPT can use other AI-powered tools, such as Scalenut, to help them with their content endeavors. If you have used ChatGPT for a few days, you would realize that some of what it generates is generic and verbose.
Occasionally, it gets the topic completely wrong and ends up producing irrelevant output. This is where an AI-assisted platform, such as Scalenut, can fill the gaps.
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that uses specific in-house models to train its AI and ensure that the results it generates are more in line with that of human creators. The all-in-one software lets you manage the entire content lifecycle, from keyword planning and SEO research to writing and optimization.
Sign up for a free 7-day trial today to explore its wide-ranging tools.