ChatGPT - Fab research tool but beware the Boris Johnson-like confidence

Start of the year is an insanely busy month for Sarum, so you might ask why would I be taking time out to add my voice to what must be the most talked about thing in tech now—ChatGPT??

I honestly don’t think I can avoid it, as I seem to be hearing the anguished cries from every quarter right now, from educators to writers and clients are asking for our take on it. When colleagues at content agencies have been calling to say they feel threatened by it, I can’t in good conscience not say something.

Look: I've run a PR agency for over 20 years. Content is our middle name: we write lots of by-lined articles, press releases, blogs, ebooks, insights, guides, white papers; we're PRs and writers, that’s what gets us up in the morning and what pays the bills. So that means I am surrounded by stacks of writers, PRs, ex-journalists, and we've all seen technologies come and go in the years we’ve been creating and placing that content, pre-Web and then online and social.?

Incredibly useful for desk research

I have to say some of them we now see as basic tools, once were deemed to threaten our very existence, etc., yet somehow, we’re still here. But I’m not saying ChatGPT has blithely passed me by.?We've been using ChatGPT since it first popped up in November last year, as we’re naturally curious tech-friendly people, so getting our hands dirty on the next open AI tech is a fairly natural thing for us to do.?

And there’s much I love about it. Let’s be honest it is rather impressive is it not! ?It is incredibly useful for desk research, for kickstarting a vague notion and quickly getting the basics in front of you, and in seconds. Why would you not use it to get a content piece started? Anything that makes me more efficient and saves me and, very importantly, the client time, and gets me up and running on a B2B software and services or Life Science topic quickly—that’ll do nicely.?

Saving that time means Sarum can spend more time doing the bit where we add value—like interviewing SMEs (subject matter experts) to get their specific, individualised, brand-supporting voice, their opinions, their insights, their hard-earned advice, which has been accumulated and cultivated from deep, deep experience, and which we then reflect in great articles, opinionated blogs, insightful, and genuinely fresh, thought leadership and so on.?

That is not what ChatGPT is trying to offer. Nor, I would argue, is it capable of offering that. So even though I already love it and use it daily to support desk research type tasks, I don't feel threatened by it. We do what it can't do: we add the colour, the fresh insight, the opinion—the stuff that makes readers read client articles, blogs, and content.?

?Horses (and generative AI platforms) for courses

If your content is the bland, repetitive corporate spiel, alphabet soup kind of content then go for it—fill your boots with ChatGPT.?

But I'm glad to say that kind of vanilla content isn't what our clients want their name on, nor is the kind of content I would want to be crafting.

So, I say use it: get down and dirty with it. Understand its usefulness to you now, and what you can do to take advantage of it—maybe to have questions to use in your interviews to get quicker to the good stuff your SMEs want to share with the market.

BUT—be careful how much trust you put in it. Fact check, fact check, fact check!

In more than one test project I found way too much bias. In one very specific job, ChatGPT very, very confidently (I'm talking Boris Johnson's level of confidence) gave me absolutely incorrect facts on a topic that I knew well. That was a warning light, as were repeated inclusion of inappropriate terms that we simply could not use in copy. I really do hope no-one would use without a lot of editing, checking and addition.

ChatGPT is a valuable research tool, then. But no good PR would see it as replacing him or herself anytime soon. So, I kind of suspect Sarum will still be using human writers and content experts when we celebrate our 40th anniversary.

(Note to self: ChatGPT, How do I maximise my pension so I don’t have to work another 20 years? ;)