The ChatGPT era is here and you can tell by the headlines. A couple of years ago when other AI-powered solutions started emerging, not everyone noticed because of how rough around the edges they used to be. But even if you live on some remote island, safely tucked away under a rock, chances are the news has reached you by now.

And that’s ChatGPT in a nutshell – what else needs to be said?

If you want to go in-depth, many things. First off all, not many people realize its true capacity. Not only can it generate copy that is almost indistinguishable from what a real human writer would produce, it can also teach you how to do certain things and even code an app or a browser extension you can plug and play, sometimes with minor modifications and sometimes as is.

A tool like this is effectively shaking up the world of marketing and content production as we know it. Students are even using it to cheat on their essays and homework, forcing many schools to go back to the standard pen and paper means of examination. In addition, Microsoft has publicly announced that ChatGPT will become a part of Teams, with Office integration being a tight consideration as well.

The real question is, what separates it from perfection? Does an astronomically powerful tool like this have any shortcomings at all? Moreover, is it safe to use for your content creation needs and where do we go from here in relation to the future of work as we know it?

We’ll be answering all of that and more in our take on ChatGPT.

An overview of what ChatGPT can do

Before we can progress to the game-changing implications of ChatGPT, it’s crucial to give you the right idea of what it’s capable of. These are the kind of things that work right here, right now, 0% theory and 100% practice.

In our previous article, we talked about how ChatGPT can revolutionize your social media marketing, listing concrete ChatGPT examples to illustrate its capabilities. But keep in mind this was in the context of SMM, although some of these usage examples certainly have a broader scope of application.

Let’s expand on that by giving you a more comprehensive overview of what you can use it for.

Writing content

Most people use the ChatGPT content writer functionality and leave it at that. Fair enough – the content it generates is quite well-researched (with limitations we’ll touch on shortly), human-like, and passes duplicate content and originality checks.

Creating and organizing spreadsheets

If you have a messy spreadsheet you want organized or you want to create a new one from scratch, there’s your go-to tech assistant you can converse with using nothing but plain English.

Performing SEO on your website

Indeed, ChatGPT SEO is a thing now. For instance, you could have it scrape your website and identify potential issues with your on-site SEO or even suggest new low-competition keywords you could be targeting, along with title ideas for content that would fit your niche.

Checking your content for plagiarism

Although there are several tools you could use for the job (the best of which are likely to be in the paid category), that’s another use of it that’s easy to forget. Might as well save a few bucks and free up your browser’s bookmark bar for something else if it’s an option.

Coding an app

In case you’re wondering whether you can use ChatGPT for coding, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’! This can be anything from a browser extension or a standalone app, without knowing how to write a single line of code. Simply tell it what you’d like your app to do and let it whirl.

With that being said, there might be some bugs to iron out on the first attempt, so being proficient at coding sure does help. It’s by no means a requirement though – you could describe what the problem was with the first version and what you’re looking to get fixed and chances are you could get yourself a working snippet of code in your next couple of attempts.

Ethical hacking / penetration testing

ChatGPT cybersecurity introduces a whole new deck of cards to the art and science of penetration testing. Long story short, it’s a cat and mouse game of who can sniff out the holes first; the good guys or the bad guys.

In other words, if you want to protect yourself from hackers and cyber criminals, you need to have at least a basic theoretical understanding of how they compromise computers and networks. If you don’t know where to start, ChatGPT will take you through it.

Having it take a look at your CV and suggest improvements

Helping someone land a job is big business, make no mistake about it. At the end of the day, these CV template niche websites haven’t sprung up without a reason. Now, you can have ChatGPT be your personal career counselor, the kind you don’t have to pay for.

Diagnosing an illness

When a doctor attempts to diagnose an illness, in their mind, they are following a flowchart that starts with working with known variables (the symptoms described). The problem is, this requires long years of training and experience, and even then it’s next to impossible to get the diagnosis right every single time.

No one is downplaying the respectable amount of effort and mileage med school graduates have accumulated over the years, but at the end of the day, they’re still just human. ChatGPT can generate a treatment plan within seconds and is immune to bias and fatigue, unlike what can be said for a human brain.

ChatGPT’s weaknesses

The technology is still in its early stages, so it’s a safe bet we can expect several improvements over time. But as things stand right now, ChatGPT does have certain shortcomings, the most notable of which is fact fabrication. In other words, the tool is notorious for coming up with falsities and presenting them as though they were facts.

To be fair, its creators do warn you about it right at the welcome screen. Still, this presents some restrictions in the ways it can be used, which is both good and bad news – looks like humans will still play a role in content creation after all, but the roles are going to shift from them being the creative force to a slightly more editorial direction (more on this later).

Another one of its weaknesses is that it tends to write in a machine-like, pattern-based style. Although the content it generates is mostly accurate and grammatically flawless, it lacks that emotional spark of a talented human writer. Of course, the content needs to be informative, but it’s not enough to keep a reader around – you also need to find a way to create the engagement, which is something ChatGPT is not the best at right now.

Then again, people have already found a workaround. One thing you can do is to simply use another AI tool and have it rewrite its output. Better yet, you can use ChatGPT for content that would be considered engaging by giving it more detailed instructions on what style to use before it starts writing. So technically, you wouldn’t even need to use a third-party tool to accomplish this if you’re familiar with some advanced ChatGPT prompts.

Finally, you should keep in mind that it was only trained on data up to 2021. If you were to ask who won a recent sports event, for example, you’d find it struggles with providing you the correct answers. This makes the tool suitable for generating content around evergreen topics, but less so about any recent happenings. Although there are workarounds for that. You could, for instance, scrape a news piece, let ChatGPT study it, and order it to rewrite it.

SEO considerations for AI generated content

Since its inception, people have been using ChatGPT for SEO. Finally, a tool that provides a solution to all those cumbersome SEO and link building tasks that often require a boatload of content, and who has the time and resources to build all of that manually, right?

Well, with a tool like this, generating SEO content is a breeze, although some people are having second thoughts about using it on their main websites due to concerns of Google being able to detect that they are, in fact, using AI generated content.

Even at this point in time, there are AI-powered detectors that can somewhat reliably estimate whether a piece of content was written by a human or not, mostly by analyzing its sentence structure. It turns out there are two key characteristics to look for in this regard; namely, burstiness and perplexity. The lower they are, the more likely it is that a ChatGPT detector will start ringing.

But what about Google’s stance on AI content? Initially, they declared such content as spam, but interestingly enough, their stance has changed since then. Now, AI content would only be regarded as spam if it isn’t helpful in answering the user’s query. Let’s emphasize that again: Google is giving you the green light to use ChatGPT for content if you so desire (on the condition the content is helpful). And that’s an SEO game-changer right there.

Although Google could very well shift gears once again in the future, right now, the matter is very much settled. AI content ranks just fine and search engine algorithms won’t penalize you for it.

From creator to editor: a change in roles

Everything considered, the writing on the wall is clear: ChatGPT is here and certain jobs can now be at least partially automated because of it. This is good news for those who used to outsource them (or still do) and bad news for those providing them.

Or is it? Remember that it would be foolish to let ChatGPT run its course unmoderated because it’s prone to making factual errors and outright fabricating facts on the fly. Even if you were to use it as the primary gear in your content generation machine, you’d still need someone to oversee it and make sure that its claims are an accurate representation of reality.

Based on this, it’s unlikely that creative professions like writers and translators will be phased out completely merely due to the existence of AI content generators. For instance, although ChatGPT translation might technically get the job done, a real human translator could still reasonably improve upon its output, for instance by sprinkling in an idiom or two. Remember that the fearsome AI tool is better at handling factual content than the one with artistic undertones such as poems, fairy tales, fiction, and the like.

Therefore, it’s likely that professional content creators of various sorts will still be around for the foreseeable future, it’s just that the role they play in the creative process will shift into a more editorial direction. At the end of the day, it’s a game of what approach can generate the most content without making compromises in the quality department. To keep both at a competitive level, it could be that fact-checking and stylistically improving upon AI generated content will be the next in-demand job role.

Let’s take a look at a practical example. As you may know already, Ocoya has a built-in AI content generator that’s built on the same technology as ChatGPT. Therefore, you can expect its output to be at the same level. Still, even though it can generate high quality social media and other types of content within seconds, it’s still on you to choose the most appropriate one.

We’ll talk you through the process of using Ocoya’s AI technology to generate a description for a YouTube video.

First, head onover to the main menu and locate the AI Copywriter section to the left. It's one of the main options so you can't miss it.

Keep scrolling down until you see the YouTube Description section and click it.

Give it some basic information to work with and let it generate YouTube descriptions for you.

Finally, take your pick from a number of descriptions Ocoya can generate for you at the click of a button. That's the power of AI!

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ChatGPT marks the end of an era for some and a refreshing change of pace for others. Although it can be a powerful content generator, diagnostic tool, and even your personal coach if need be, it does come with certain shortcomings its developers still need to address. Everything considered, it’s frighteningly close to perfection and there are workarounds you can apply in the areas it still struggles with.

Our verdict is, if you’re not using ChatGPT in your business right now, it’s only a matter of time before your competitors outpace you. The only thing that still stands in the way of letting it loose completely and having it become a relentless content-generating machine is the need for a real human being to oversee its output to separate the facts from fiction. But other than that, your content output is bound to increase just for having a tool like this work for you.

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