ChatGPT was launched on November 30th, 2022, and quickly became the talk of the internet. There has already been a deluge of articles and videos talking about how the newest AI platform either will or won’t take over the internet and put us all out of jobs.
At the risk of only adding more noise to the topic, I’m adding my take on the subject. I specifically want to dive into how this platform can impact construction businesses, and a few of the trends you might want to watch.
What is ChatGPT
In essence, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence platform that generates content. In many ways, it’s a bit like a Google search. You type in a question or a command, and ChatGPT will do its best to respond.
For example, I typed the query “What is ChatGPT” into the search bar and this is the answer I received:
“Hello! I'm ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI. I'm designed to understand and generate human-like text based on the input I receive. I was trained on a vast amount of text data, so I can help answer questions, provide information, or have a conversation on a wide range of topics. Feel free to ask me anything!”
It can also do things like generate articles, write school papers, create lists of information, rewrite drafts that its already created, and generally produce written content very quickly.
Just for fun, I entered the query “What does ChatGPT Do” into the search bar and the answer I got back is:
“As a language model, ChatGPT is designed to generate human-like responses to text input. This means that ChatGPT can do a lot of things, including:
1. Answering questions: You can ask ChatGPT anything, and it will do its best to provide a relevant and accurate answer.
2. Providing information: ChatGPT has access to a vast amount of text data, which means it can help you find information on a wide range of topics.
3. Chatting: ChatGPT can engage in conversation on various topics and can respond to your messages in a way that mimics natural human conversation.
4. Generating text: ChatGPT can generate text on a wide range of topics, such as writing prompts, summaries, product descriptions, or even creative writing.
Overall,
ChatGPT's primary function is to understand and generate human-like text, which
makes it a valuable tool for a wide range of applications.”
Crazy stuff right?
The platform is extremely popular. It hit 1 million users in 5 days. Its growth has only skyrocketed since then, hence the deluge of articles, including this one.
My Takeaways
1) Efficiency
Switching back into the world of marketing and construction marketing specifically, I believe ChatGPT’s most impactful feature will be the boost it will create in content marketing efficiency.
Every content marketer knows that generating content can be an uphill battle. Trying to be creative, relevant, and impactful can be extremely taxing on a marketing team, let alone an individual trying to do it all. ChatGPT is a great tool for just getting words on paper and doing so quickly.
For example, I asked ChatGPT to write me 1000 words about donuts. It took 4 or 5 minutes to generate 565 words. With a little extra prompting, it got me to the 1000 words. Not bad for a pretty innocuous topic.
As it relates to construction marketing, ChatGPT can help generate content ideas and actual content for a variety of topics. In my experience, a lot of construction businesses lack content marketing strategies, so this platform could level the playing field.
2) Quality
To understand the quality of content generated on ChatGPT it's helpful to understand how the platform works. I’m not a software engineer or a machine learning expert so we won’t go too deep here, but ChatGPT has processed terabytes of data that contains words and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to respond to queries. As it answers more queries it continues learning and getting smarter.
So, in general, I’d say the quality of content coming from ChatGPT is OK. In many circumstances, it's relatively generic and can only essentially aggregate what has been created before. And while you could copy straight from ChatGPT and paste it onto your blog, I wouldn’t recommend it.
You won’t be winning any Pulitzer, but it can greatly speed up your content creation process, or help you start one if don’t have one.
3) Its Drawbacks
In this section, I’d like to address the “ChatGPT is coming for all of our jobs” folks. Yes, ChatGPT is a new technology and it has some wide-reaching implications.
Do I think it will destroy jobs, especially in the construction industry? No.
Will it change the way we work? Maybe.
As I mentioned before, ChatGPT is a great content aggregation tool, and it can answer a lot of search queries, but it does have some major drawbacks. And from a marketing standpoint, its biggest drawback is Google.
Google is taking note of ChatGPT and is working quickly to come up with a response. One of the first things that Google did after ChatGPT became so popular so quickly was to implement a system that would penalize websites that heavily rely on AI-generated content. Google is very good at determining what is AI written and what was written by a human.
Your content still needs to provide value, you can’t just copy and paste what’s already out there.
ChatGPT’s second largest drawback is the person entering the information. I.E. the user. The quality of the prompt that goes into ChatGPT dictates the quality of answers coming out. Many professions love to fall back on the adage “Garbage in, Garbage out” and that’s exactly the case here.
Conclusion
What’s new is often misunderstood, and I think some of that might be coming into play with ChatGPT. Don’t get me wrong, this technology is already having an impact on how some industries work. But as we’ve seen time and time again with new technology, it may change how people work, but at some point, there will still be people doing the work. I predict that’s what is going to happen here. ChatGPT will become a powerful aid to construction companies looking to boost their marketing efforts, and it will help marketers churn out more high-quality work more efficiently. So at the end of the day, I think ChatGPT will be a useful tool. And a tool is only as good as the person using it.
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