I first heard about ChatGPT (and AI overall) in the context of content creation. That was in December 2022, and social media influencers were touting it as the next big thing.
As a writer, this obviously concerned me. I was convinced that a career I had spent decades pursuing was all but over. After some sleepless nights, I signed up to see exactly what ChatGPT could do.
At the time, I was working on an article on Fleetwood Mac's greatest songs, so I asked ChatGPT what it knew about the song "Dreams." Despite the text being grammatically correct, the information it gave was not. (Stevie Nicks wrote "Dreams," not Christine McVie.)
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The next night, I was able to sleep more soundly, assuming that the death of my career (and, in large part, the demise of human content creators) had been greatly exaggerated.
Yes, the cat is out of the bag - AI tools are not going anywhere. Various industries, such as customer service, human resources (HR), healthcare and, more specifically, content creation, have already started implementing them, but the application of ChatGPT and other AI-generated tools is still being defined.
So far, it seems like one big PR stunt put out by companies to appease investors who are jonesing to jump on the latest trend or a complete race to the bottom with misinformation no longer a concern as long as it generates clicks.
ChatGPT was introduced to the world on Nov. 30, 2022, through its parent site, OpenAI, and was met with immediate and polarizing reactions, from blind panic to outright mockery. What wasn't expected was how quickly it became popular. As of February 2023, Digital-Adoption.com ranked OpenAI as the 44th-most visited website in the world. Traffic has increased by over 3,500 percent, from 18.3 million upon to 672 million visits, since it first launched.
ChatGPT is a language model that is pre-trained on vast amounts of data. Once it has been trained, it can generate responses in real time, based on that data. As users interact with the tool and provide feedback on the responses generated by it, the model can be further trained and improved to become more accurate.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the workplace as I type, from automating routine tasks to providing insights that inform decision-making. But one of AI's most promising (and most popular) applications is in the use of conversational AI. ChatGPT, which can understand and respond to natural language, leads the charge, but there are plenty of other apps out there from Microsoft's Bing to Elon Musk's allegedly soon-to-come TruthGPT.
Chatbots have been used by businesses for some time, and ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot that is already used in a variety of ways. For some industries, it is indeed promising. In customer service, it can handle routine inquiries, freeing up human agents to deal with more complex issues.
Human resources is another area where ChatGPT will prove popular, as it can automate the recruitment process, from writing compelling job descriptions to outreach emails to finding potential candidates and reducing the time and costs associated with scheduling interviews and assisting with basic HR-related questions. In healthcare, it can be used to automate appointment scheduling, prescription refills and triage. It may even provide patients with information about their conditions and treatments.
For more about ChatGPT, check out Work + Money.