ChatGPT & Google Bard

It’s the artificial intelligence chatbot that has taken the world by storm since its launch in November – and ChatGPT certainly divides opinion. Here, Infotex’s Digital Strategy Director Tim Webster explores how you can harness the power of AI tools in your business, and highlights some potential limitations.??

There has been a lot of noise in the media over the last month over the rapid rise of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing’s AI enhanced search.?

AI is nothing new, but ChatGPT has captured people’s attention since its launch - reaching 1 million users in less than a week, and 100 million in under two months.?

So what is ChatGPT??

Basically it’s a chatbot. The tool lets you provide a natural-language prompt or question, and then ChatGPT responds back in natural-sounding language.?

The bot will use the previous questions or prompts to assist in responding to future questions on the same thread.?

Surprisingly - or perhaps to avoid the SkyNet of Terminator films - the bot doesn’t use the internet for its response. It’s solely based on the huge data set it has been trained on.?

You can request it to answer questions or be creative by writing a poem on a specific topic.?

Many are using it to write covering letters for job applications, solve maths problems with a step-by-step breakdown of the answer, and write code that goes into websites.??

?

ChatGP in practice?

At Infotex we polled the team as to how they’d been using ChatGPT and their answers give some great examples of how you can start using AI tools in the workplace.??

Answers include:?

• Created a fairly complex Excel function to validate some fields.?
• Brainstorm content ideas, which can then be expanded on.?
• Write some code to automate screenshotting a website that was protected by a username/password (don’t worry, they knew the username and password, it wasn’t hacking!)??
• Extracted some key content from a long section of text, and formatted it in a specific way for reuse.?

ChatGPT isn’t foolproof though, and even ChatGPT’s owners OpenAI give a word of warning.?

“It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now,” they say. “We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”?

?

But what about the other, similar, AI technologies available to you???

Google Bard and Bing?

ChatGPT’s rapid rise has prompted Google to expedite their new AI-powered search feature ‘Bard’.??

This uses natural language processing and machine learning to provide more relevant and insightful information to users.?

I don’t expect it to replace the traditional ‘10 blue link results’ in Google but do expect the top section of the results pages to begin including AI-generated responses and answers to questions or queries.???

This could be game-changing for search in many ways:?

• Distilling information from various sources into a digestible quick answer.?
• Answering specific questions that haven’t been answered on an existing web page.?

One downside of these generated answers would be fewer clicks on the organic results, which would be frustrating for website owners looking for traffic.?

As it’s Google, I’d expect to see them protecting their more commercial search terms which would currently be occupied by paid ads.?

It wouldn’t be too difficult to keep commercial queries (“car insurance”) and general questions (“what is Newton’s third law”) separate.??

At the same time, Microsoft is also adding AI-generated answers to its Bing search results. Again, adding AI-generated responses to the search page results.??

These are just a few examples of the many applications and uses of ChatGPT. Its versatility and ability to understand and generate human-like responses make it a valuable tool for a wide range of industries and use cases.?

?

About the author?

Since Tim Webster joined Infotex in 2002, he has been at the forefront of some of its most long-lasting strategic client relationships.?

Tim oversees our team of digital marketers and designers who are here to make sure that Infotex delivers websites with great design, messaging & user experience, and marketing and advertising that reaches the right audience with the right message, and that all of that is tracked and understood.?

He is usually one of the first ports of call for strategic clients, as his chief goal is to understand their customers, and so help them understand their website and customer better.?