ChatGPT is Great at Brainstorming … and Plagiarizing Dr. Seuss!

 
ChatGPT home page (part)
 

The good, the bad and the ugly of ChatGPT

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Whether you want a sugar cookie recipe or a poem about black holes in the style of Dr. Seuss, ChatGPT can take a shot at it. 

If you have a question, ChatGPT has an answer. And if you need an article, ChatGPT can write one. So it’s understandable that some students are asking it to write their essays and some businesses are asking it to write their blog posts. It’s free, so why not!?

But while ChatGPT is a lot of fun, and can be genuinely helpful in some aspects of content creation, it’s important to understand what it does well and what it does very, very badly.

What is ChatGPT, Anyway?

According to ChatGPT, ChatGPT is “an artificial intelligence language model … trained on a large dataset of text that is able to generate human-like responses to a wide range of prompts.”

Like texting apps can predict the next word for the sentence you want to write, ChatGPT is designed to predict text, drawing upon millions of human-generated documents to predict how a knowledgeable human would answer your question. 

(Here’s a more comprehensive explanation for those who want it.)

While ChatGPT will answer any question it’s asked, it doesn’t really understand how the world works - it simply understands how people write. This is both a strength and a weakness.

ChatGPT - The Good, the Bad, and the Silly

It’s Good at Brainstorming

When we work on a client’s branding, we spend a lot of time brainstorming taglines - those phrases on your website’s homepage that set the tone for your business. 

We’ll spend a couple of hours just tossing ideas at each other, coming up with 50-100 taglines and then cutting out the weakest ones. Then we discuss them with the client to see what resonates.

For something like this, ChatGPT is great for generating new ideas. 

When I asked it to give me taglines for a content marketing company called Pearl Consulting NYC that specializes in telling companies’ stories, it immediately reeled off a bunch, like "Bringing your story to life," "Helping you share your unique voice," and "Crafting compelling content for your brand."

None of these are very original. But if you ask for 50 taglines, you may get one interesting idea or word choice that gives you a new creative path to travel down - which can be very useful.

ChatGPT probably couldn’t have come up with our actual tagline, “finding the gem in your story,” but with enough prompting, it might have helped us to come up with it.

It’s Good at Writing Sample Documents

Let’s say you want to write an article on how a company can use blogging to help grow their business and you’re a little stuck. You can ask ChatGPT to write one for you. It might not be a great article. It might be blandly written, inaccurate, and incomplete, but it will give you a structure and an approach. And when you’re stuck, getting something on the page can be invaluable.

It’s Bad at Accuracy

As I mentioned earlier, ChatGPT works by predicting what a human would say. The problem is, it’s not necessarily predicting what the best-informed human would tell you. Anyone who has spent much time browsing the internet knows that a lot of human beings are posting information that is flat-out wrong, and ChatGPT doesn’t have a good system for determining what is accurate. 

ChatGPT will also simply make things up if it doesn’t have a real answer. 

This doesn’t mean you can’t use ChatGPT to write an essay. It does mean that you should be prepared to verify everything it writes. 

 
Cover of Dr. Suess book

It Plagiarizes Other Writers

When I asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about traveling to outer space, it began: “Oh the places you'll go/Up in space, it's quite a show.”

“Oh the Places You’ll Go” is the title of a Dr. Seuss book. This makes sense - if you want to predict how someone will write something, why not just predict they’ll write something they’ve written before?

If you use ChatGPT to write your copy, there is no guarantee that it will be 100% original.

As for the rest of ChatGPT’s poem, well, it’s a very poor imitation of Dr. Seuss, lacking his style and cleverness. This leads to my next point:

It Lacks Your Voice

If you produce long-form content like blog posts or newsletters, what makes them appealing is your unique voice. People will read your content because they feel you are a knowledgeable person giving them your insights in your unique brand voice. ChatGPT can’t do that.

ChatGPT isn’t even very good at writing in famous voices. We asked ChatGPT to write some copy as Courtney Love, Raymond Chandler, Tom Waits, and Hunter S. Thompson, and it gave us almost the exact same text for all of them with very small word changes. For example, Raymond Chandler and Tom Waits both began with “I've got a little story to tell you” while Thompson started with “I've got a little something to tell you.”

For those who think of blogging as nothing more than creating a series of words on a subject so you have more content for Google to index, ChatGPT is a great way to produce content (assuming the experts who say Google may detect and penalize AI-generated content are wrong). But if you’re looking for interesting, accurate, and original content to differentiate you, you’re not going to get it - yet.

ChatGPT is Amazing and Fun, But Don’t Rely Too Much on It

If you haven’t played with ChatGPT yet, you really should - it’s amazing. Even when it’s wrong, or says something dumb, the fact that an A.I. can answer your human language questions and actually keep track of your conversation is mindblowing. I could spend all day playing with it.

Just remember that, as amazing as it is, and as incomprehensibly brilliant as the technology behind it is, ChatGPT still lacks the kind of imagination and original thought you’d find in a typical human five-year-old. It’s just a very fancy algorithmic system.

Still, judging by ChatGPT, we’re getting close to the day those five-year-olds will become obsolete. Until then, you’ve got us, ready to add our human touch to your content and branding. Contact us to learn more.

 
Charles Herold