After much research and debate, I could not find a single productive use case for an African brand to get involved, apart from anything to do with gaming. I even stood on various stages defending my position and offering my view on where the opportunities do exist. I’m not saying the Metaverse is not going to take shape, it just won’t be in our immediate future as the barriers for entry are just too high for Africa.
As the year progressed, so interest in the topic waned. We went back to writing strategies and developing campaigns that involved real world stuff, solving problems for brands wanting to reach people going about their daily lives.
Come December, posts about ChatGPT began flooding Twitter and Tik Tok. Headlines like “Write your social posts in seconds…” and “it’s only been what, a month? Pandora’s Box has been opened…” and even “This revolutionary AI technology will change our lives as we know it!”.
So what is it exactly? I went straight to source and asked ChatGPT to answer this question and this is what it replied.
ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. It’s based on the transformer architecture, which allows it to process input sequences in parallel, making it faster and more efficient than previous models. But what really sets ChatGPT apart is its ability to generate human-like text. It can continue a given text, answer questions, or even generate a full conversation.
This makes ChatGPT a powerful tool for businesses and organizations looking to improve their customer service or automate certain tasks. For example, imagine being able to train a chatbot on your company’s FAQs and have it answer customer questions 24/7. ChatGPT can help to do that, and more.
But ChatGPT’s capabilities go far beyond chatbots. It can be fine-tuned on specific domains, such as customer service or e-commerce, to improve its performance on those tasks. For example, an e-commerce company could use ChatGPT to generate product descriptions, or a media company could use it to write headlines and summaries. The possibilities are endless.
And it’s not just businesses that stand to benefit from ChatGPT. Researchers and developers can use it to create new and exciting applications, such as language translation and text summarization.
One of the most exciting things about ChatGPT is its ability to generate human-like text. It can be used to write poetry, compose music, and even generate entire books or articles. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for creative expression.
In short, ChatGPT is a powerful and versatile technology that has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with computers and each other. While the metaverse may still be in the future, ChatGPT is here now and ready to change the game. So forget the metaverse and say hello to ChatGPT – the future of AI is here.
I didn’t change a single word in that response, so I guess the proof is in the pudding. Because it is fine-tuned on a massive dataset of conversational text, this makes it particularly well-suited for tasks such as language translation, text summarization, and question answering. Its ability to generate human-like text and handle large amounts of data make it a valuable tool for businesses, researchers, and developers.
And this is where the sparks begin to fly. I am already seeing both the Doomsayers and Protagonists arguing over this. “AI will take our jobs” countered with “it will allow you and your team to focus on the important stuff”. I am always careful not to join the fight until the dust has settled. In a country with high levels of unemployment we certainly don’t need machines taking the place of humans. The Industrial Revolution has already seen massive automation replacing human labour but, by and large, this has created new jobs for humans to design, build, operate and maintain the machinery. It’s still early days but I am hoping AI creates the same opportunities. Already early adopters are getting ChatGPT to write essays and dissertations for coursework submission and marketers using it to craft advertising and social media copy lines.
Sanity must prevail. There are circumstances where tools like this are useful and for the most part serve as services to humans. Hopefully, we continue in a world where people have needs and AI helps us actualise these needs. I’m hoping that without us, the AI has no questions to answer and waits in silence for all eternity for the next question.
Meanwhile, here at Mark1 we will embrace what ChatGPT and other AI tools like tome and DALL-E have to offer. We love innovation and always try push boundaries.
These need to make sense, though, like our early adoption of Programmatic Digital Out of Home (pDOOH). We see massive potential in this medium and the fact that we can buy screens across the country programmatically though both our DV360 and Hivestack interfaces makes it an easy channel to include in any digital campaign.
We are already running prototypes of chatbots using ChatGPT as the engine and are intrigued by the results. As we do with all our work, we let the machines do what they do and make sure the humans do what they do best.
Andre Steenekamp
Director of Strategy
Mark1
The image for this post was created by DALL-E with the following description request – “How AI would imagine itself if it took physical form”
