It’s all about the Chat

In early April, social media platforms were being flooded with helpful posts by well-meaning techies on “everything you need to know” about AutoGPT, the latest iteration in an artificial intelligence race that you may be feeling somewhat overwhelmed by. Having just learned how to best phrase your ‘prompts’ to determine the best outcomes, you now have to learn how to get the most out of a tool that can ‘self-prompt’.

Luminaries as prominent as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Twitter chief Elon Musk argue that the AI race dominating media headlines is one that is now completely out of control. In late March, they co-signed an open letter warning of potential risks to humanity and calling for development of AIs above a certain capacity to be halted for at least six months. (Critics point out that Musk is no longer on the board of OpenAI, the company behind the original disruptor ChatGPT)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will be only too conscious – as law firm MBD professionals – of the increasing noise around AI since the launch of chatbot ChatGPT in November. More importantly, its potential to make you obsolete!

Your fears are not unfounded … at least not completely.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) that interacts in a conversational way, gained 100 million users in its first month after launch. To put that in context, TikTok took nine months to achieve the same feat, while Instagram took 30 months, Pinterest 41 months, Spotify 55 months, Uber 70 months, and Google Translate a whopping 78 months.

Microsoft is so confident that its US$10bn investment in OpenAI is a wise one that it is already integrating ChatGPT with its MS Office Suite and Bing Search.

Tech giant rival Google has since launched an AI powered chatbot called Bard, and both developers are now working on updating their chatbots with better capabilities (it was the mid-March release of GPT-4 – which can respond to images and process eight times as many words as ChatGPT – that prompted the open letter from Musk et al).

This is where the real battleground lies.

Rather than coming for your job, Microsoft/OpenAI is targeting the far more lucrative market that is internet search (Google’s parent company Alphabet made US$86bn from search alone in 2020). Hence, ChatGPT has been dubbed the ‘Google killer’.

But content marketers will not escape unscathed from recent developments. So, should you be concerned, or excited?

 

Strictly legal

How specific industries might use Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs) and AI was highlighted at the end of March, when Bloomberg announced the launch of BloombergGPT for the finance sector.

One month earlier, the legal sector had a couple of its own precedents. In Colombia, Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia published what is thought to be the first AI assisted legal decision in a dispute between a health insurance company and the guardian of an autistic child. Then, Allen & Overy announced the launch of Harvey, a chatbot designed to help its lawyers draft contracts and other documents.

While some experts have raised concerns over the ethics of using this technology in legal settings, where accuracy is paramount, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently called for the use of AI tools in Indian courtrooms to facilitate access to justice for litigants.

Lextel recently helped an Indian client craft some thought leadership on how India’s law firms should embrace the benefits of an open legal market, despite their obvious fears, and our message is very similar on ChatGPT and AI.

Given that firms face growing pressure to embrace tech to find efficiencies for clients, here are three ways in which you can mitigate the risks of this new technology but double down on the opportunities:

Content ideation and research – If you are a content creator, you will know that learning about a topic can often take as much time (if not more) than writing the subsequent copy. AI tools such as ChatGPT can be used to research topics and create content briefs (though the results should be scrutinised closely as ChatGPT can still ‘hallucinate’, meaning it can produce inaccurate or misleading results). Users can get inspiration for titles, headers and other elements for SEO, while the tool is also very useful for finding FAQs and commonly linked sources. One note of caution: ChatGPT uses a data set that ended in 2021, which may hinder the relevance of some of your research.

Content writing (not all of it) – You will by now know that ChatGPT generates impressive and plausible copy that can mirror human language, but it doesn’t do fact checking or citations and is incapable of original thought. This of course makes it less than ideal for your thought leadership. However, it does a great job categorising information, creating summaries, and analysing data. Reuters journalists view the tool as a ‘copywriting assistant’ that can generate story ideas and write simple copy, which they then develop. You should too. Think of AI as an assistant that can help you brainstorm ideas and create your first draft. The copy still needs to be rewritten to the specific tone of your brand, convincingly highlighting your firm’s USP to attract clients … which is where you come in.

Data reporting – ChatGPT had already been blocked in countries such as China, Iran, North Korea and Russia when Italy became the first Western country to follow suit over privacy concerns. Other Western nations are closely monitoring OpenAI’s attempt to demonstrate its compliance with GDPR (as you should too). In the meantime, AI-generated data reporting can save considerable time across various research operations, enabling you to give real-time insights into sophisticated performance metrics.

 

Gimmick or game-changer

The proliferation of ‘helpful’ content across your socials – on how you too can use chatbots and GPT tech to make money before it’s too late – might encourage you to think of recent AI developments as something of a gimmick. You shouldn’t.

But nor is it a ‘game-changer’ … yet.

There are many reasons why you could lose your job, but AI is unlikely to be one of them (in the short-term at least). While AI tools may eventually phase out lower-level copywriting tasks, the more savvy among you will use AI to improve – not replace – your more sophisticated content.

And you don’t need to know all the latest trends in AI to gain some of its benefits. You just need to understand the pros and cons of these tools and develop a point of view.

As AI-generated content floods the internet, we believe that clients and prospects will crave more ‘authentic’ content they know comes directly from the minds of their external advisers. All you need to do is continue to help your lawyers develop and express their thoughts in a way that gives them the greatest chance of making the right impression with the right audience.

This more authentic content may take the form of newsletters (with strong editorials), podcasts, videos and live ‘in-person’ events. If you are thinking of shifting your firm’s content strategy to a more human approach, Lextel can help.

There is an art to drafting compelling content that robots haven’t yet grasped. “Your relationship with your audience matters more than ever, so ‘who’ is wielding the [AI] tool is crucial,” says digital marketing pioneer Ann Handley. “You can write faster first drafts, but you can’t shortcut relationships. You can’t prompt your way to trust.”