ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022 and within five days it had one million users. Just over a year later, the OpenAI chatbot has more than 1.7 billion users, with an average user spending seven minutes and 46 seconds per visit asking it myriad questions, according to data analysis site DemandSage’s latest statistics – questions that included mine on Christmas Eve.
As a journalist, I have been fascinated by the applications and potential of ChatGPT. I have been entertained by the X (formerly Twitter) threads of tech bros (here) who have asked the bot to pretend to be HustleGPT: an entrepreneurial AI who is given $100 with the goal of turning it into as much money as possible, in the shortest possible time, without doing anything illegal. The author, Jackson Greathouse Fall, gave up after a month, finding that even hustling robots were time-suckers.
As a research tool, it is astonishingly fast but there are flaws: If you pay for the plus option, the application can browse the current internet, but if you are a casual user, then you are stuck in 2021. I am old enough to remember the old “cuts” system at Associated Newspapers (former parent company of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard), pre-Google, where you could request everything published on a topic from the office library in physical form. Cuts were not allowed to leave the office (there’s an apocryphal and unverified story that the morning Princess Diana died, it was discovered an intern had checked out her cuts for some weekend research. Needless to say, the intern was fired.) With the library and Google, you knew where your sources were from, but worryingly ChatGPT delivers everything as fact. A Time magazine piece from 10 January reported on the current congressional hearings on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and all the coming copyright battles between artists, writers and The New York Times against OpenAI. The article stated: “Media executives and academic experts talked about intellectual property issues arising from AI models being trained on the work of journalists, and raised alarms about the increasing dangers of AI-powered misinformation.”
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As a writing tool, the application is also problematic. For example, I asked it this morning to describe its advantages. It wrote: “ChatGPT’s dynamic utility and adaptability empower users across various domains, making it a valuable tool for efficient communication, problem-solving, and information retrieval.” Finding the response a little dry, I then prompted it to rewrite the paragraph using a livelier tone. It returned: “It’s not your run-of-the-mill language model; it’s the cool kid on the block, acing language translation and more. Why settle for dull when ChatGPT brings the flair? It’s the secret sauce for businesses acing customer support, content creation, and brainstorming.” You can immediately see the problem.
However, on Christmas Eve 2023, fizzing with anxiety, brain winking like a demented fairy light with its ticker tape of things to do, I turned to ChatGPT and asked it to put together a Christmas lunch schedule. I inputted the serving time, all the cooking times for the turkey and the trimmings, and in seconds, ChatGPT had delivered a plan. A PLAN. Granted, I had to reshuffle parts given its unexpectedly wilful refusal to acknowledge the real cooking time of roast potatoes, and add the forgotten sprouts and pigs in blankets, but essentially it was all there. No maths. One less thing on my list. All I wanted for Christmas.
Opportunities ChatGPT presents for businesses
And I am not alone. On TikTok, the tag #ChatGPT has more than 12.2 billion views as the generations come together to tell stories about the application and provide education about the tool. Creator Laura Anderson gives guides to business-transforming prompts and cheats that feed into her 10-hour work week shtick, as well as how to train ChatGPT as your assistant, here. Other ideas from TikTok users include creating bedtime stories for children, featuring their favourite characters in self-determined situations that parents can read at bedtime (here). Travel itineraries are another popular ChatGPT application: Up-and-coming lifestyle duo Jase and Sekai (Jump Into The Map) shared how they planned their Grenada itinerary using ChatGPT. (You can read more on how AI is transforming the travel industry in CORQ’s piece here.)
Despite the research and writing concerns, AI’s ability to plug gaps in output cannot be ignored. Joshua Barnett, the dynamic director of After Party Studios, told CORQ in September that while we have only seen the tip of the iceberg of how AI will transform the creative landscape, he believes that with ChatGPT “doing a lot of the legwork” there is no excuse to have gaps in company output. In August, Natalie Fahy, senior editor at Nottinghamshire Live, told CORQ that Reach PLC were trialling a technique that was being employed by Swedish publication Aftonbladet using AI summaries at the top of online articles. Research, said Fahy, had “shown that those summaries increased dwell time on all their articles”.
For brands looking to utilise AI in their products, it’s clear that consumers are most interesting in technology that can make their lives easier and more efficient. It also has plenty of benefits for marketers – or at least, for those who beware the aforementioned pitfalls of accuracy and succinctness.
There is also the usual fearmongering, such as this post, which was filmed once GPT-4 chat was activated. Earlier this month, OpenAi CEO Sam Altman told Bill Gates on his podcast Unconfuse Me that the upcoming update GPT-5 will be “fully multimodal with speech, image, code, and video support”. Mr Altman, I will not (for now) be upgrading my free service for an all-talking, all-viewing model, and ChatGPT will not be writing my articles. But will I be continuing to explore the ways ChatGPT can help me organise the rush hour of my life? Computer says yes.
By Emilie McMeekan, CORQ features director.
