Wait, what… we actually use ChatGPT?

Great photo by Cottonbro Studio.

​ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? 
 
Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. 
 
Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. 
 
Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so.
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
What it is… and isn’t
 
When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? 
 
No. 
 
We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. 
 
Ignorance is what breeds fear. 
 
Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power.
 
We’ll take the latter any day of the week. 
 
ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. 
 
You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. 
 
ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. 
 
All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative?
 
Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? 
 
Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. 
 
It’s a tool.
 
We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. 
 
See? You’re laughing. 
 
Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do.  
 
So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. 
 
Some caveats
 
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. 
 
It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. 
 
And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) 
 
The good stuff
 
Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT.
 
We do this for many reasons: 

1. We’re honest. 
2. It provides pricing transparency. We never charge for querying ChatGPT. 
3. It provides us with plausible deniability: “Here’s what ChatGPT spat out; don’t be surprised if you find garbage here.” 

​So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) 
 
Some examples: 

• A client of ours was slated to attend a trade show. They wanted to come up with promotional ideas for getting contact information from people (prospective clients) who would visit their booth. Clearly, this is an exercise that’s been performed by countless others, countless times. Why reinvent the wheel? We asked ChatGPT. It spat out about 20 suggestions; our client actually used about two or three. We consider that excellent. 

 

• Another client of ours was looking for provocative discussion-starters to post on social media, centered around a certain business issue. We asked ChatGPT. Sure enough, others had thought of the same stuff before; ChatGPT was able to effectively organize it for us in a matter of seconds. 

 
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. 
 
So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. 
 
Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

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