Maybe you read Orwell’s ‘1984’ as a child or watched Will Smith in ‘I, Robot’ from behind the sofa in your parents’ living room? Perhaps even you’re part of the ‘Ex Machina’ generation?

The fact is this… It doesn’t matter whether you’re 8, or 80, a story of “the robots taking over” is part of your cultural heritage. But don’t worry, you can stand down soldier. They aren’t coming to steal your jobs, separate you from your family, or break your heart just yet (see Spike Jonze’s “Her” for that last reference).

Today, we’ll explain why (and show you how) AI’s new favourite child, chatGPT, can actually help you out, streamline your creative process and increase your profits – we’ll also tell you when the human brain is still vastly superior.

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What does chatGPT actually do?

Well… why don’t we ask the machine itself?

“ChatGPT is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is trained on a dataset of conversational text and is able to generate human-like responses to a wide variety of prompts.”

Ok, let me give you that in English.

ChatGPT works by guessing the most likely next word of a sentence. You can see it as an “auto-complete”, taking prompts from the user such as “write me a sentence about game development, but in the tone of Shakespeare” and providing what it sees as the most likely outcome.

ChatGPT: “Verily, the craft of game development doth require equal parts of technical prowess and imaginative flair, and therein lies the true beauty of this digital art form.”

So how can it help you?

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Where does ChatGPT excel?

It’s an unspoken truism that the first few words, brushstrokes or notes are the hardest an artist has to make.

Creative block is so often a stumbling point to productivity and it’s unavoidable. Every artist at some point will find themselves staring at a blank page for five minutes with nothing coming to their mind.

In these cases, ChatGPT doesn’t destroy art, as some may suggest, but instead generates ideas that fuel further thought in the writer’s mind.

Just as a musician might hit the ‘random’ button on a synthesizer to get a new sound, chatGPT can provide the writer with a perspective they’d never thought of or a new sentence to bounce off.

Not only this, ChatGPT can help you to translate work into another language, rephrase a sentence you’re struggling with or elaborate on a piece of writing you’ve already made.

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Where does chatGPT fall short?

Artificial intelligence is a loose word, and frankly, an unhelpful categorisation of this new generation of technologies. They are, without a doubt, brilliant, but are they intelligent?

ChatGPT is an incredibly good word prediction algorithm, crunching billions of points of data to determine what the likely next word in the sentence should be. It almost always sounds plausible, so it’s no surprise it’s taken the world by storm.

But remember this - GPT can’t understand context and meaning, because it doesn’t actually “understand” what it is saying. It simply uses data to predict what’s likely to come next.

The problem with these algorithms is that they assume humans will choose the obvious or “right option”. But we’re emotional beings – how we think and feel affects our choices and often sees us taking unexpected turns or thinking “outside of the box”.

Without contextual understanding, these AI systems often fall short to data bias and can end up unreliable – not to mention their repetitive nature due to the fact they can only generate text similar to their text references.

Their usefulness then lies in our ability to enter the right prompts (a skill worth learning) and a level of chance in selecting the right data to go from.

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What does the future hold for these AI tools?

With every generation, AI gets one step closer to “feeling human”. Who is to say that in 2, 5, or 10 years they’ll have us fooled? We certainly wouldn’t bet against it and would tread with caution around any further developments. But we also see it as unlikely, due to the challenge of understanding context and emotional cues.

But with the right approach and the right methodology, we’ve found several great uses for ChatGPT and AI’s graduating class of 23’ - both as creative tools, but also as tools for challenging our thoughts and processes.

Have an interesting take on AI, or want to discuss how you could use it in your workflows? We’d love to hear from you.