Please note that this article is intended for educational purposes only and should not be deemed to be or used as legal, employment, or health & safety advice. For guidance or advice specific to your business, consult with a qualified professional.

What is ChatGPT and How to Use it For Your Business

AI is one of the most frequently-debated technologies in business today. At best, it has the capacity to ease workflows, reduce administrative pressure on customer-facing staff and increase profitability. At worst, it can render employees and make their skill sets redundant, and take the human component out of what makes your brand so special.

Whenever a new AI application is introduced to the masses, it always causes a stir in the business community, whether that’s from excitement or insecurity. ChatGPT is an interesting example that neatly encapsulates the opportunities and caveats of working with AI.

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What is ChatGPT?

Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), better known as ChatGPT, is a chatbot developed by a research body led by Elon Musk and Sam Altman called Open AI. It has a range of capabilities from answering simple questions to translation to creating and curating long-form content.

How does ChatGPT work?

ChatGPT works by pulling information from a vast dataset in response to user prompts. In this sense, it is much like a search engine. However, the dataset that it draws upon is not limited to web pages. It also draws information from journals, articles and books.

The process is as follows:

• The user generates an input (i.e. they ask a question or present ChatGPT with a task)
• The programme’s speech recognition algorithms break the text down into individual units called tokens
• After tokenisation, each token is encoded into a numerical value that can be processed by the neural network
• The neural network then processes the tokens using its knowledge of language to generate a response to the input
• The output is then decoded and presented to the user as a natural language response

Other AI language models have been around for some time, most notably popular platforms like Jasper, Copysmith and Wordsmith and Quillbot.

However, several factors make ChatGPT a game-changer:

• It draws on a vast dataset estimated to be hundreds of billions or even trillions of words
• It employs cutting-edge AI techniques such as unsupervised learning and transformer models. These enable it to learn and adapt to new data without the need for human intervention
• The latest iteration uses GPT 3.5 architecture which features additional layers and parameters to offer a more powerful and versatile model
• It is 100% free to use (though users will need to upgrade for $20 USD per month to access it during busy times)

What ChatGPT can and cannot do

Looking under the proverbial bonnet, it’s easy to see why businesses are excited by the prospect of ChatGPT. It is powered by an extremely robust architecture and leverages powerful machine-learning techniques.

It has an impressive range of capabilities, including:

• Answering questions and interacting with users in a believably human manner
• Writing stories, blog posts and other forms of online copy
• Generating code in a range of languages including HTML, Java, Python, C++, Ruby and Swift
• Detecting bugs in user-generated copy
• Summarising long passages of text
• Proposing SEO-friendly keywords and incorporating them into user-generated copy
• Translating copy into different languages
• Carrying out a sentiment analysis on text provided by users

However, it also has some significant limitations. ChatGPT cannot create, it can only assimilate creation. It can take bits and pieces from its dataset and cobble them together in ways that seem creative. For instance, if you ask it to tell you a joke, it will find something that it recognises as a joke within its dataset and accommodates any adjustments or parameters the user provides.

Chat GPT also cannot yield unique insights. It can only assemble appropriate information that it deems relevant from its dataset. For instance, take a look at what it offered us when we asked it to explain the benefits of cashless payments:

While the language used is perfectly fluid and passably human, the information it provides is at best fairly elementary and at worst inaccurate (most cashless payment systems require the user to have a bank account of some kind). Although it doesn’t glaringly look like it was written by a machine, it also doesn’t look like it was written by a particularly proficient or knowledgeable copywriter.

Chat GPT is also incapable of technical writing and may struggle with more specialist subjects. It cannot interview experts in a chosen field or cite its sources. Areas like consumer finance that are heavily regulated will need to carefully proof and edit ChatGPT content to ensure that no compliance issues are raised.

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Although it’s important to note that ChatGPT is constantly evolving and improving, copywriters, SEO agencies and journalists needn’t fear for their jobs just yet.

How to use ChatGPT in business

Despite its inherent limitations, ChatGPT is still a useful tool for all types of businesses. It can create content in huge volumes extremely quickly, and adapt to a variety of use cases. The caveat, however, is that the content it creates should be rigorously proofread and edited, and its results measured regularly against the relevant KPIs to make sure it meets your operational and financial goals without compromising the quality that customers associate with your brand.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the ways in which your business can use ChatGPT to its advantage.

Customer service

ChatGPT’s original intended function is customer service. As such, it can be a reliable chatbot for fielding customer questions and connecting them to the relevant web pages, resources or personnel. This can ease the pressure on customer service employees allowing them to spend more quality time with customers, developing the kind of relationships that keep them coming back.

ChatGPT and content marketing

Your [business marketing strategy](https://squareup.com/gb/en/business-launchpad/grow/business-marketing-strategy} almost certainly involves some form of content marketing. This can take many forms, including:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Marketing emails
• Newsletters

Unique online content not only gives your brand an SEO advantage, it also positions you as an authoritative resource and adds value to the customer experience. ChatGPT can be an extremely useful tool in content marketing. It can aid human copywriters by:

• Providing ideas for blog posts
• Padding out or shortening content
• Inserting keywords into the copy to make it more SEO-friendly
• Preventing creative block by providing a copy to edit and expand upon instead of starting from scratch
• Creating multiple versions of the same page with slightly different wording (e.g. regional landing pages)

Product pages

One area in which ChatGPT excels is its ability to create content at volume. This makes it perfect for jobs that require substantial word counts but do not need to be written with much creative flair. As such, they are good for creating descriptions for the product pages of an online store.

Avoiding duplicate content

Duplicate content is an important issue for growth-hungry businesses that want to expand into international territories. If a UK business wants to target customers in other English-speaking countries like the US, Canada, Australia or New Zealand it will need to have its own local website with its own localised content. Since Google may penalise brands for posting duplicate content on these websites, ChatGPT can be employed to rework existing posts for consumption in other territories without SEO penalties.

Translation

Speaking of international markets, ChatGPT can also be employed to translate your existing web copy into other languages.

Social media

Because it can create copy so quickly, ChatGPT can create large batches of social media posts, which can be divided up and posted to the relevant platforms as your social media strategy dictates. Posting more often can improve your visibility and increase your chances of engagement with prospective customers.

How does ChatGPT content affect Google rankings?

Because of its ability to create vast volumes of content in a short space of time, businesses may understandably see ChatGPT as a sort of SEO dream ticket. Companies could conceivably populate their websites with hundreds or even thousands of web pages overnight. Surely, this would cause their website to skyrocket to the top of search engine results pages?

Unfortunately not.

While Google doesn’t necessarily penalise AI-generated copy, large volumes of it won’t necessarily do wonders for your SEO either. In February 2023 Google’s guidance on AI-generated content basically reiterated its commitment to quality content however it’s generated. Because ChatGPT is, by nature, incapable of generating unique new insights that are of real value to users, brands are unlikely to appease Google’s helpful content update with AI-generated copy alone.

That’s not to say that businesses will plummet in search engine rankings if they start posting copy generated by AI tools like ChatGPT. But their use should be employed alongside unique copy written by your team or outsourced copywriters, and their output should always be proofread and edited by a human.

Chat GPT pros and cons

Now that we’ve taken some time to explore the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT, let’s distil them down to a list of pros and cons. These can be used for quick and easy reference when deciding whether to employ the language model as part of your operational or marketing strategy.

Pros of ChatGPT

• Can answer simple questions in a way that seems authentic and human
• Can produce large volumes of content in a short space of time
• Has a wide range of functions outside of generating content including editing, customer service and even generating code
• Useful for high-volume tasks that do not require creativity such as writing product descriptions or spinning existing landing pages into multiple regional variants
• Free to use and affordable to upgrade
• Always learning and evolving
• Wide range of business applications
• Can remember what users have said earlier in conversations
• Has been trained not to answer inappropriate or offensive requests

Cons of ChatGPT

• Cannot yield unique insights or genuinely creative copy
• Copy can come across as bland or unengaging
• Cannot write knowledgeably about complex, technical or specialist fields
• Can occasionally produce inaccurate or outright false information
• Its dataset was created in 2021, so it has no knowledge of world events or trends since then
• Can lead to compliance vulnerability if not carefully proofread and edited by a human expert

Getting the most out of ChatGPT

Like any tool, ChatGPT is more effective when you know how to use it properly. With a little practice and a clear strategy, it can be a useful tool in your company’s arsenal, even if it’s unlikely to revolutionise your operations or marketing efforts.

Here are some tips for getting the most out of ChatGPT:

• Be clear, specific and comprehensive when giving commands. Like a human copywriter, the better the brief is the better the output will be
• Provide it with samples in order to analyse and replicate your tone of voice
• If it does something wrong, (word counts are commonly undershot) tell it what it did wrong and to try again
• If the results fall short of your expectations, try using the ‘regenerate response’ feature
• Instead of providing ChatGPT with long lists of commands, break it down into single separate commands
• Make sure its output is always proofread and edited by a human being

Why not start experimenting with ChatGPT right now? Have some fun getting to know what it does best, and where there’s room for improvement and start discussing with your team how you could bring it into the fold.