ChatGPT on the Innovation Scale

ChatGPT opens the eyes of both communication professionals and consumers to how far AI has come. Ask a random question and you will get a credible human-like answer in real time. AI thus creates an intelligent chatbot that thinks and behaves like a human. This raises the question for the industry of what the value of ChatGPT is for brand thinking.

In this blog Paul Ketelaar analyses ChatGPT on the five pillars of the Innovation Scale that are central in the book “23 Innovations in Digital Communication, written by him with Jan Aarts and Sanne Demir (Ketelaar et al., 2019).

How does ChatGPT score as an innovation for the industry, according to the he five pillars of the Innovation Scale? These pillars are: User-friendliness, Effectiveness, Ethical resilience, X-factor, and Future resilience.

What is the future perspective of ChatGPT?

What is it?
ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is a generative language model that can be used to generate text, such as answers to questions, writing stories or making short summaries. ChatGPT has been trained on a large amount of text, which enables it to give contextually correct answers to a wide range of questions. ChatGPT can be of value for brand thinking in different ways.

Here are some examples:

Content generation
ChatGPT can be used to automatically generate content, such as product descriptions, blog posts, or social media posts. This can help in more efficient and consistent communication of a brand.

Creation of unique content
ChatGPT can be used to create unique and appealing content, such as stories or sales copy. This can strengthen brand identity and awareness.

Determining consumer insights
ChatGPT can be used to analyze what consumers are saying about a brand or product category, and thus gain insight into what consumers value or where they have problems. This can help in improving brand positioning or developing new products or services.

Brand names and slogans generator
ChatGPT can be used to generate brand names and slogans that are unique, memorable, and relevant to a particular product or service.

Creative brainstorming
ChatGPT can be used as a tool for creative brainstorming and generating new ideas for brand campaigns or product launches.

It is important to emphasize that ChatGPT is only a tool and that the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input and the way the model is used. A professional brand thinker or marketer will always have to make the final decision on how ChatGPT is used in the brand strategy.

On the Innovation Scale
As you may have guessed, the above text is the literal answer from the open source platform chat.openai.com to the question what is the value of ChatGPT for Brand Thinking. Let´s take a critical look at the answer and evaluate ChatGPT based on the five pillars of the Innovation Scale.

User-friendliness ★★★★☆
User-friendliness makes ChatGPT popular. The innovation is incredibly easy to use for marketing and storytelling: you give the chatbot a task or you ask a question, ranging from a few words to a whole paragraph. The tool writes the text at lightning speed, in the desired tone of voice. Training or specific knowledge to use the innovation is not necessary, and after creating an account, ChatGPT is (still) free. However, the answer needs to be edited and fact-checked, as it is not usable at once. Although teachers struggle with the application of this dreamed-of homework robot, communication professionals have a handy helper for brainstorming and writing stories.

Effectiveness ★★★★☆
ChatGPT has an impact on the branding industry, as we are already using it! As ChatGPT itself indicates, it quickly selects information and writes useful texts. However, like the above text written by ChatGPT, they are not always well-written and, contrary to what it claims, not always contextually correct. Whether the language model takes over the work of writers is doubtful. ChatGPT claims to create unique content, but it mainly parrots what is already there. It cannot be (yet) unique because it is based on existing data. It summarizes what already exists and expresses it in an extremely credible way. ChatGPT is (yet) not very creative, although this can be debated. ChatGPT´s creativity also lies in combining existing things, and a large part of human creativity is also that. The chatbot is significantly more creative and grammatically correct in English than in Dutch. It is (yet) dependent on human input and does not (yet) adequately respond to users needs and emotions. ChatGPT will not take over the work of specialists, but it will change it, just like other technological innovations did. Thus, engineers will come up with good assignments and questions for ChatGPT.

Ethical resilience ★★☆☆☆
An innovation is neither good nor bad; it depends on how people deal with it. ChatGPT is based on large amounts of text available on the internet and does not distinguish between what is morally good or bad. ChatGPT tries to circumvent ethical problems by setting rules and claims not to give answers to offensive or discriminatory questions. So far, ChatGPT is not very transparent. We do not know what ChatGPT is based on, who manages the content, and whether or not there should be copyrights for the chatbots output. The innovation hardly mentions sources, making the information (yet) unverifiable. You have to fact-check and edit it yourself. Because it presents a story almost grammatically flawlessly and tells it in a logical order, you do not realize that it may not be correct. Criticism is that it undermines our thinking ability. But isn´t it true that it thinks for us and increases our search comfort by collecting useful information, thus leaving more room for our creativity? Our phone has been an extension of us for years, and it does part of our thinking: who still knows phone numbers by heart?

X-factor ★★★★☆
ChatGPT clearly has enormous appeal, as evidenced by the number of users and the attention of communication professionals. Although chatbots have existed for a long time and are often less popular, this automated conversational partner shows how far artificial intelligence has come and what everyone can use it for. Even though the novelty has worn off, we are curious about the follow-up. The successor ChatGPT4 will appear in 2023. Tech giants like Google will respond. If the developments continue at this pace, the attention and relevance of ChatGPT will grow in more and more contexts. Virtually every AI-based innovation, such as Deep Fakes, leads to technopanic about harmful consequences. For our industry, it also raises provocative questions about applications: do you let ChatGPT think along with ideas you have for a brand story, or even let ChatGPT come up with the story? Do you interview ChatGPT in the role of a consumer as a form of market research? Will there be a ChatGPT disclosure?

Future-proof rating ★★★★★
ChatGPT is here to stay. This makes AI not a thing of the future, but a reality. It´s a tool in our daily lives and work. As for the future, ChatGPT uses more data and understands better what we ask for. The interaction between humans and machines seems more like how humans communicate with each other. ChatGPT supports brand building by analyzing marketing strategies and understanding brand identities. It assists in marketing communication, creates product descriptions, writes social media posts and scripts for commercials, executes customer loyalty programs, and manages customer service. AI creates not only text (text-to-text; ChatGPT) but also images (text-to-image; DALL-E), video (text-to-video; Runway), and audio (text-to-speech; Hourone). Because these AI programs quickly and often perform time-consuming tasks well, they are valuable to our industry.

Toolkit
ChatGPT is an extension of us and changes the way we work. Activities that we do ourselves now will be carried out by ChatGPT in the future. It's a tool in the toolkit of communication professionals, just like other intelligent media. Ultimately, brand building remains a human endeavor, with super handy and fast assistance in the background.

“Once the technology is invented, it will be very hard to ‘uninvent it’ and not use it.”
McLuhan, 1964