How to work with bots, not against them
Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore the hype around OpenAi’s ChatGPT.
Just this week, it has penned poetry that has gone viral, it has ‘stolen’ jobs, threatened the existence of school homework, got millions of people talking, and been accused of being woke. It’s no surprise it is constantly at ‘full capacity’, it needs a day off.
We all know AI isn’t anything new, so why is this chatbot causing such a stir?
Why has it been key in finally breaking AI into the mainstream?
Why are tech giants jumping on the bandwagon, despite several fails (e.g. Google’s up-and-coming chatbot has already cost the company $100 billion after it gave the wrong answer in a promo video)?
Because it’s a fast learner.
It can reel off information in seconds, it does the thinking so you don’t have to and it can give you a fountain of ideas. It helps solve everyday problems, it puts stuff into words for you and it’s careful about saying anything offensive. It’s almost always right and isn’t afraid to tell you if it doesn’t know the answer – all with a sprinkle of swagger.
Sound familiar? I don’t know about you but that’s pretty much the ‘required skills’ section of my job description. Despite all of this and the constant ‘we will all be replaced by robots one day’ headlines, I see it as an opportunity rather than a threat.
Nothing can replace human instinct.
It's that gut feeling you get when you’re onto something, the ability to read a room, and the buzz when you crack something as a team.
In our field of work, if we don’t welcome AI tools like we would a new team member and work with them, there’s a chance we could be left behind.
We also need to remember that generative AI relies on information that’s already out there in the world. It is simply amalgamating what already exists, or in ChatGPT’s words: ‘Generative AI refers to a type of artificial intelligence system that is designed to generate new content, such as text, images, or music, based on the patterns it has learned from existing data.’
While I believe that no thought or idea is truly original and is instead a mash-up or rehash of something from the past, tools like ChatGPT can help us uncover what already exists, so we can go about improving and innovating with our human touch, to create something that feels fresh and unique.
That’s where I think it comes into the creative strategy process and can help us work smarter, rather than replacing us.
Five tips on how to use ChatGPT to complement the creative strategy process:
Use it as a starting point for research, but don’t rely on it for the answers - Once you’ve defined your key research questions, ask ChatGPT for the answers as a starting point before going far and wide. This can be helpful when you need a quick summary on a topic before diving in, giving you the foundations before you build. But don’t rely on it for the facts, always validate.
Add to your list of ideas, but don’t necessarily use them - I’ve found it useful when I’m in the ‘divergent thinking’ stage, focussing on quantity over quality and going through the process of getting all the sh*t ideas out first (whatever you like to call it, we all do it and it’s an important part of the creative process). Just before you move on to narrowing down your ideas, sling the brief to ChatGPT to make your list even bigger.
Put your key message into words, but make them better - Quite often we land on the sentiment of a message but haven’t quite cracked the articulation. Give ChatGPT a copy brief to see how your message has been written before, then rewrite it and make it better.
Get in the zone quickly, but don’t forget other techniques - In my role, I straddle strategy and creative and am therefore constantly flipping between thinking styles - one minute I’m in a deep strategy hole, the next I’m bouncing ideas round in circles. Try using ChatGPT to quickly get in the zone. This is ideal if you need to refresh yourself on a complex or niche subject - simply ask it for five key things you should know and then move on to your usual techniques.
Have fun with it, but don’t get too carried away - Don’t overthink it, have a play with it and input something random, but don’t waste valuable time in there - it’s easily done.
Disclaimer: This article was written by a human, unless mentioned (although ChatGPT would have probably done a better job, to be fair).
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