ChatGPT and Ad:Tech

I’m sure you’ve all heard about Microsoft’s recent integration of ChatGPT’s AI solution, to its search engine Bing, which would allow users to receive native responses to their online queries.

Nothing but Amazing!

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Google would not allow itself to stay behind for too long, and had already shared it is also working on its own AI solution, called Bard.

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This is certainly a significant change in the way that we surf the web, looking for answers to our questions, and much like everyone else, I keep wondering about the (massive?) impact this would have on our lives once fully deployed.

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So to all of you who haven’t heard about ChatGPT and its AI capabilities, I must ask- where have you been!? In essence, ChatGPT is a program that had been given an astonishing amount of information to “digest”, and in return, it is capable to receive queries, to which it replies in a native language as a part of a sophisticated algorithm that can predict what would have been the best sentence to reply with.

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Here's an example of such a reply from ChatGPT, when I asked it to summarize in 100 words what ChatGPT is all about:

ChatGPT is a language generation model developed by OpenAI. It is based on the transformer architecture and is trained on a diverse range of internet text, allowing it to generate human-like text in response to prompts. ChatGPT can be used for various NLP tasks such as text completion, text generation, conversation simulation and more. It has been fine-tuned for specific domains like customer service, conversation generation, and content creation. With its advanced language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can provide relevant and coherent answers to a wide range of questions and prompts, making it a powerful tool for businesses, researchers, and individuals.

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As an Ad:Tech enthusiastic and business owner, I tried to envision how such a tool would change and alter the environment we work with. As “the prophecy was given to the fool”, I do understand that trying to grasp such a huge change, while contemplating on its affects, is meant to fail, I still think that the main aspect of the below would indeed materialize one way or another.

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Think of the last time you turned to Google for something. You asked a question, and Google provided you with endless “solutions”, all of which were links to sites, where you could potentially find the answer to your question. For example, when you wanted to bake a cheesecake, and asked Google for assistance, you were immediately redirected to various sites where you looked for the “right” recipe.

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Not anymore.

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Once the integration is done, and the solution becomes available for all users, the most reasonable outcome of such a request would be a combined result- links to different locations on the web, alongside a detailed response showing the exact recipe you were looking for.

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“How does that affect us” you say? Tremendously! Imagine a prominent, content based website, that used to gain user attraction by taking the “right” SEO steps, promoting itself to the top of the search engines' results, suddenly becomes irrelevant, and stops seeing users coming from these search engines almost completely. A complete and huge impact to the eco-system that would create a (set of?) new entity(s) that would literally rule the web by handing out the users exactly what they wanted, without the need to dig deeper into search results or websites.

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But don’t worry. This does not mean the end of traditional websites. People would still visit their favorite sites, and still consume content throughout the web, via different means such as direct visits, redirects between websites, through user acquisition, and even through the updated search results, however, a majority of the websites’ sessions would simply be eliminated. As a result, I predict that quite a few websites would probably need to shut down due to the lack of activity and monetization.

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It seems to me like we’re on the verge of a significant change that would soon be unveiled.

As the old Chinese saying goes: “May you live in interesting times”. It is about to be very interesting in Ad:Tech!