ChatGPT, Are You for Me?

Once upon a time, chatbots were relegated to the realm of customer service or online support. But the emergence of accessible generative AI has changed all that. The biggest buzz in the AI hive is being driven by the cleverest of chatbots, ChatGPT, which is being used for nearly everything, from pure entertainment (explain quantum theory to a child in the style of Snoop Dogg, anyone?) to research papers, translation services, recipe generators, and Google on steroids. But is it for you? We wondered, too. So we put it to the test as a tool for us as marketing communications pros, and for the life sciences clients we serve.

Here are some of the most promising uses we found in our initial trials.

1 IDEA GENERATOR?

Need some suggestions to kick-start your creativity or group brainstorming sessions? We challenged ChatGPT to come up with product names, ad slogans and even TikTok scripts for a hypothetical client involved in the field of antimicrobial resistance. The results were pretty promising. For TikTok, the bot suggested ‘Antibiotic Overuse: The Musical,’ ‘The Germ Evolution Dance Challenge,’ and ‘Antibiotic Wisdom Raps.’ We then asked it to generate a rap song, a rock opera and a Shakespearean sonnet. While the results were mostly entertaining, they also sparked some ideas for catchy social media campaigns.??

2 EXPLAINING COMPLEX CONCEPTS

This is one of the biggest challenges science communicators face: transforming extremely technical scientific papers into concise text that is easy for the average reader to understand while still being accurate and true to the science. ChatGPT can provide a great starting point, as demonstrated by this transformation of the abstract of Utilizing co-abundances of antimicrobial resistance genes to identify potential co-selection in the resistome.

This function is clearly handy for blog posts, website copy, event summaries, social media threads. But we also envision its use for business owners trying to come to grips with other complex matters, such as new labor laws, tax codes or FDA regulations.?

You can also tailor ChatGPT to different audiences, or in different tones.

• Top Tip: Type "learn" and paste the URL you want to "research" (blog post, science journal, etc.)

3 CONTENT ASSISTANT

We’ve already shared some uses of ChatGPT in helping to create written content. We took it a step further and asked the bot to generate entire press releases and blog posts. The results were pretty impressive. But they definitely required tweaking. In fact, we would encourage doing so to avoid inadvertent plagiarism – since you can't always see where bot pulls its info from, there may be a risk it's using some text beyond what would be covered by fair use laws – or “AIgiarism,” the use of AI tools to generate writing that can be passed off as one’s own.

ChatGPT and other AI bots also sometimes very confidently make things up, which in the AI world is called a "hallucination," so, fact check your work! You may even want to use an ap in development for that. As Brittany Trang of STAT noted, because ChatGPT was trained on a dataset from late 2021, its knowledge is currently stuck in 2021, so? it thinks Betty White is still alive, Anthony Fauci is not retired, and Elon Musk hasn’t bought Twitter. (Read her article about potential applications and considerations in health care).?And while ChatGPT cannot entirely do the work for you, it can be a tremendous enhancement and time saver. And you can even ask it to check your final work against the Associated Press Style Guide. Bonus!

Other writerly request prompts: Analogy generation, passive to active voice, verb boost, tone change, sentence rewrite, sentence simplification or two-sentence stories. You could also use ChatGPT to help you with sales tasks, such as introductory LinkedIn emails.???

In addition to words, AI can help generate visual images. Deep.ai generates images from text, and can do so in a variety of styles, from logos and 3D objects to cyberpunk, abstract and renaissance paintings. Even better, you can see what other users have generated using similar prompts (and hover over the designs to see the exact text they used). Openai original DALL-E can create some gorgeous images, and its little sister, craiyon is another great option.?

Here’s a selection of antibiotics related art, for example:

• Top Tip: The more specific and comprehensive you are in your prompts, the better results you will get. And if you don’t get what you are after the first time, try, try again.

4 EVENT AND INTERVIEW PREP

Organizing a conference or webinar and need speaker suggestions? We asked for 10 top experts in antimicrobial resistance, and the resulting list contained a demographically and geographically diverse mix.?

Want to be prepared for questions the audience might ask (or have a few in your back pocket in case the room falls silent)? Here’s what ChatGPT alternative YouChat came up with:

This function could also be useful for media interview prep or when coming up with an outline of topics to address in presentations, blog posts or Google search queries to include in SEO strategies.?

5 INTELLIGENCE GATHERING:

Querying ChatGPT about your company can be a great way to see what’s out there about your business. It might reveal gaps in information or misinformation you may be able to correct.?Ask it to write a marketing brochure about your company and see what it generates. Then give it some specific key messages to include and try again.

Chatbots can also help you think like a consumer. We asked YouChat about the challenges pathologists face and what solutions they wish were available, for example.?

Another big timesaver is assistance with SEO and social media research. You can use ChatGPT to generate keywords, Google queries, meta descriptions, hashtags, Twitter influencers, and even tweets themselves.?

• Top Tip: Ask the AI bot you are using to cite references for the answers it returns. This will help in fact-checking, as well as tracking down mentions and misinformation

BONUS: Simplify even further

Using AI chatbots is pretty simple as it is, but you can automate your life even further by integrating it into WhatsApp, Gmail, Google Sheets, and more. Here’s a handy list of extensions, including God in a Box, Merlin, and CodeGPT.

As noted earlier, ChatGPT is not the only game in town. You.com not only features an AI chatbot, but also more guided prompts, such as YouWrite and YouImagine, an image generator.

If you’re willing to pay a small monthly fee, programs like Copy.ai and Jasper.ai provide a comprehensive, easy-to-use service that eliminates the need for you to craft prompts. They have dozens of categories that cover a huge variety of use cases. And they are more reliably available than ChatGPT, which is often down due to overwhelmed servers. Additional options here.?

CONCLUSION:

We’re sold. ChatGPT is a great tool to accelerate and amplify creativity, and we look forward to discovering even more ways it can fit into and augment our workflow. It’ll also be interesting to see how it evolves. The nature of the AI tool is that it’s always learning and improving, based on how it is used and feedback from users. We loved how it learned from our own sessions and integrated past queries in clever and creative ways. We were also surprised by its humor. Asked to write a comedy monologue about itself, ChatGPT made fun of its prior results from our prompts asking it to write Seinfeld scripts and Academy Award acceptance speeches, and the results were hilarious.?

However, there will always be a special role for the Ed Yongs and Carl Zimmers of this world, with their original, enlightening analogies and engaging science storytelling. And there is still great value in the nuance and strategic approaches that seasoned communications professionals inject into every campaign. It’s up to us to ensure we remain relevant by continuing to add value as the media, technology, and business landscape flashes forward at a meteoric pace.?

What other ways have you used generative AI for creative marketing programs? What are you most excited about?