The wave that is called OpenAI
“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” Every now and then a product is being launched that revolutionizes an entire industry. Such is the case with OpenAI. Within 5 days from its launch on March 24 2023, OpenAI’s ChatGPT gained over one million users, revolutionizing practically any industry as we know it. As artificial intelligence advances, more businesses are interested in AI-powered solutions to improve their marketing efforts. One of the keys to making the most of the tech in marketing is to write effective AI prompts to generate the desired outcomes. We and dentsu have been experimenting with increasing the input for ChatGPT to increase the quality (prompting) of the output. For those who did not have the chance to get acquainted with the program, hereby a short answer to the question ‘What is ChatGPT? and especially how you can use ChatGPT to your advantage. We will describe the mastering of ‘prompts’ and will shine a light on the new business model of selling your ‘prompts.’
Let’s start with the basics
ChatGPT is an AI language model trained by OpenAI. ChatGPT is one of the most advanced language models available today, capable of understanding a wide range of topics and producing high-quality responses. It is a Natural language processing model, or large language model (LLM). It stands for ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT)’, meaning it is trained to respond to human input in a conversational way. It engages in natural sounding conversations. Generative AI is a subset of artificial intelligence that uses deep learning algorithms to generate new content, such as images, text, or sound. It does not copy and paste from the internet. Instead, it is trained on an insane amount of data like books and articles, with a cutoff point in 2021. It basically generates its answers by putting pieces of text together based on a statistical model trained on billions of text samples from across the internet. However, it can’t be seen as a knowledge database, and be aware that it sometimes generates plausible sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
Bearing in mind all of the above, what is the buzz all about then?
People took to social media to share examples of ChatGPT's many capabilities - from casual conversation to essay writing and coding. Since its launch, it has changed the face of the internet indefinitely as well as the fundaments of companies alike.
The impact of ChatGPT on our work life
Now our point of view on the question ‘What will OpenAI’s impact be?’ We see articles popping up by the minute. Mentions like ‘ChatGPT is reducing workforce’, ‘ChatGPT makes us lazy’, or ‘Chat GPT decreases our creativity’ are not uncommon in the debate. Investment bank Goldman Sachs states that 300 million jobs worldwide are at risk from automation due to ChatGPT. However, human judgement still needs to be applied to these technologies to avoid error and bias. Furthermore, every disruption in any industry also creates new jobs, albeit often in other (new) professions and sectors. Research conducted by Salomons in America shows that 60% of current jobs did not exist in 1940. The rat race has only just begun. As for the potential threat. We as strategists don’t see the immediate threat. We will not be able to solve strategy problems for our clients without the involvement of colleagues who understand the customer experience and what the client is trying to achieve. The trend for more than two hundred years has been that automation creates new jobs, although ones requiring new skills. One of those skills is prompting.
As for the answer to the question ‘How can I master the power of OpenAI’? Let’s dive deeper into what the ‘Power of Prompting’ entails.
Lately, we have noticed articles and job descriptions on LinkedIn with catchy (fancy) titles like "How to become a prompt engineer." But what exactly is a prompt and how can it be used in your daily work? A prompt is a request, or a task assigned to the AI to prompt its creativity. Think of it as a mini creative briefing. Just like a creative briefing, they can be good and helpful or vague and misleading. So, the way you structure and phrase the prompt is crucial for producing high-quality output, with our new digital assistants ChatGPT or Midjourney for example. Prompts can be used in a variety of day-to-day activities, like chatbots and automating customer service, marketing, and content creation. The possibilities are endless, limited only by our imagination.
One company cleverly jumping on the bandwagon of the OpenAI trend is Promptbase, an innovative platform where writers and users from all over the world come together to buy and sell such ‘prompts’. The platform offers prompts not only for GPT, but also for content creation (Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion).
As writers, we use the platform to both sell and discover new prompts that can improve our daily work and personal lives. The platform is user-friendly and makes it easy to find new prompts or ideas based on keywords and categories. We have also sold multiple prompts on the platform, with a primary focus on business and strategy solutions. These prompts are intended to help professionals in fields like marketing, accounting, and project management to work more efficiently and achieve their personal goals.
"The accuration of YouTube data classification was 36% more accurate
by deployment of ChatGPT"
On the work floor, we are regularly asked if we have sold some more prompts, but not only us, dentsu itself is already making flying hours. We started applying a wide range of capabilities, always in a safe way, in various projects and service lines. As a result, strong evidence for the use of OpenAI was provided within a short time. Not only to make efficiency gains, but also to realize quality improvements. Think of:
- The efficiency of A/B scripting of CRO;
- Generating creations for digital & (D)OOH campaigns;
- Writing ads for Search & Social Media;
- Quality improvements and expansion of functionalities in in-house tooling such as iActivate, iScraper and dentsu Quality View (DQV)™.
The accessibility of these advanced models has meant that, with dentsu's internal tooling, we have been able to make big strides in a particularly short time. During the busiest period of the year, OpenAI saved us in some cases a substantial amount of hours.
"Threat or not?"
Whilst Generative AI has the potential to revolutionize marketing, it is not a replacement for human expertise and creativity. AI should be used to augment and enhance marketing teams to increase productivity, efficiency, and return on investment. Rather than feel threatened by Generative AI, it should be seen as a powerful collaborator.
To quote innovation and digital transformation expert Tom Goodwin: “We need to go from business strategy, supported by a tech strategy, to business strategies that focus on what technology makes possible.” Companies should start introducing tools that can augment human thinking, not replace it. Dentsu is carefully and considerately exploring ways to do so. This article was meant to introduce you as a reader to one way of augmenting, not the way. We hope you will carefully and considerately start using prompts, good luck with your endeavors.
*Disclaimer: this article is man-made and not generated by ChatGPT.
This article is written by Lars Majoor and Martijn Lindeman, both strategists at dentsu Benelux.