Happy birthday, ChatGPT!
At one year old, a human baby might be able to say a few words, point and wave and take their first steps.
Nov. 30 will mark one year since the public release of OpenAI’s large-language-model-based chatbot, and it’s safe to say it’s had different milestones.
ChatGPT’s busy year has included racking up 100 million weekly active users, testing in the top 1% for human creativity and being slammed for perpetuating bias, misinformation and creative theft. At least it didn’t profess its love for a New York Times writer.
The generative AI tool has also been very good for OpenAI (setting aside the recent drama with Sam Altman, who’s now back at the company’s helm after his board unexpectedly fired him in mid-November). The well-financed startup is seeking an $80 billion valuation and has one of the most visited domains in the world.
But more than anything, ChatGPT ushered generative AI into the mainstream. And in the advertising industry, marketers have spent the past year using ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to execute a wide range of tasks, from generating ad creative and penning product descriptions to automating media buying, planning and optimization.
On the eve of ChatGPT’s first birthday, we asked the following brand and agency experts: How are you using and thinking about generative AI tech in your marketing, one year after ChatGPT’s debut?
- Miguel Martin, head of digital marketing, Joe & The Juice
- Kayla Santos, head of brand, True Classic
- Emmanuel (Manu) Orssaud, CMO, Duolingo
- Jack Smyth, chief solutions officer, Jellyfish
Miguel Martin, head of digital marketing, Joe & The Juice
Going forward, I believe we’re going to be able to train these products to emulate brand tones and voices more accurately – and that’s going to greatly increase efficiency when it comes to performance and content marketing.
It would be highly beneficial for us to leverage products that offer platform-specific asset generation and direct publishing. This reduces campaign go-live times enormously and also enables quick experimentation and testing at scale.
Kayla Santos, head of brand, True Classic
I hope AI will never replace models [in the apparel industry], as this is where brands can show personality and relatability, but I do believe cost and time efficiency can come via AI, minimizing the need for many ecommerce photoshoots.
We are also at the beginning stages of how generative AI can enhance virtual fit technology. I look forward to the day when virtual fitting rooms become true to product fit and aesthetic to improve the consumer journey in digital shopping.
Emmanuel (Manu) Orssaud, CMO, Duolingo
Recently, our marketing analytics team built out an AI data scraper to help identify social trends, which we aim to automate using AI. We’ve also experimented with using ChatGPT to identify future cultural moments for the brand to tap into.
In the future, we see great potential for performance marketing automation with AI, which will be a key area of experimentation for us in the coming year. This could include localizing assets for multiple markets or creating multiple variations of the same assets to feed a marketing asset pool.
Jack Smyth, chief solutions officer, Jellyfish
One year of ChatGPT and 100 million weekly active users later, we’ve realized it’s never been easier to be average.
Generative AI’s biggest impact is taking brands, products and teams from below average to baseline. That’s not just opinion: Associate Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton proved it with his seminal paper.
Creative teams pre-flight test with Bard and content teams generate product description copy on the fly to pair with top-performing executions. We’ve invested in proprietary tools that ensure we can pair LLM productivity gains with sensitive data, giving every strategist a sparring partner.
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed.
