There is always concern and disruption when new technology is introduced. The fact dates all the way back to Socrates, who was concerned that the cutting-edge invention of writing might cause children to become forgetful and slothful. And it still exists today despite the recent arrival of generative AI. Tools like ChatGPT are capable of passing MBA exams and having believable—though occasionally really creepy—conversations with people.
This AI. Tools offer business owners apparent opportunities; soon, they might be assisting you in writing your routine emails and updating your social media feeds. Yet technology and economics experts are also concerned about the disruption that these technologies might bring about for both society at large and the online content economy.
Will chatbots eliminate jobs or just accomplish menial tasks?
In recent weeks, a deluge of opinion pieces has examined these issues, with many of them taking the legitimate concern that artificial intelligence (A.I. Many human office workers could be replaced in the near future by technologies.
ChatGPT can search Google far more efficiently than I can, and it can create a generic article about grizzly bears in a matter of seconds as opposed to the several hours it may take me. Dan Kay, a writer on Medium, admits that his essay wouldn’t be much better than ChatGPT’s and predicts that “content is about to be roiled by upheaval. We will be swept away in a tsunami of “content” created by robots. And it’s not only authors who are concerned about a tsunami of robot-generated Bullshit; it will no longer be an efficient use of one’s time for a person to develop content.
But for every writer concerned about A.I.-generated content, there is another who believes these tools will instead reduce tedious work and boost productivity, which may be excellent news for company owners.
Preliminary MIT research is presented in this article from Wired, which shows that when office workers were given access to ChatGPT to help them with daily tasks, “they were able to complete the assigned tasks in 17 minutes, compared to an average 27 minutes for those without the bot, and that the quality of their work improved significantly,” in addition to the fact that the workers were more satisfied with their work.
How are experiments with ChatGPT possible?
But in the meantime, if you generate content to market your business, you can start exploring the potential uses of these tools to eliminate some of your own donkey work or that of your team. How many jobs ChatGPT may replace—or create—is likely to remain the subject of fierce debate for years, if not decades.
A.I. enthusiast and entrepreneur Maximilian Vogel recently compiled thousands of links to generative A.I.-related resources on Medium, including an astounding 500+ prompts for marketers and content producers to experiment with and investigate the potential utility of these tools, such as:
400+ prompts for content producers and bloggers
Five suggestions for content development from an engineer
11 ideas for quotes and threads on Twitter
Prompts for marketing text, subject lines, emails, etc. from a digital strategist.
a hundred-plus social media posts prompts
I have no idea if using these prompts will help you be more creative, waste your time, help your business, or result in delightful text that is full of errors.
Every expert agrees that disruption is coming; if you want to remain ahead of it, the time to start investigating the possibilities is now. Nevertheless, neither I nor anyone else can provide concrete answers to these issues given the rapidly evolving and new instruments at our disposal.