Caution: ChatGPT Hallucinates

Why ChatGPT can damage your company’s reputation

The Promise of ChatGPT for Marketers

The promise of using machine learning and artificial intelligence in marketing has gotten a lot of attention with an ever-growing list of use cases, as evidenced by the fact that in its first five days, ChatGPT sprinted to over 5 million users.

ChatGPT provides amazingly rich and human-like content, performs research, brainstorms content ideas, and supports SEO efforts with ease—all for free, in a few moments, and at a fraction of the costs of having to pay for such efforts.

Here’s what ChatGPT had to say about itself…

A highly intelligent content writer could have written the answer above. Now think about the applications of using ChatGPT for:

Researching and brainstorming nearly unlimited ideas for content
Writing articles and product descriptions or providing live answers to questions
Summarizing interviews, transcripts and longer-form content
Creating options for headlines, social media posts, emails, landing pages, and ads
Changing the writing tone and expressions, language translations, and content personalization
SEO keywords, meta descriptions, and analytics
Press releases, summarizations, introductions, reviews, website copy, etc.

ChatGPT is so impressive in creating content and providing answers that it has actually passed graduate-level tests and the bar exam.

So why should marketers proceed with caution? The answer starts with incorrect information, AI hallucinations, and more!

The Significant Downsides of ChatGPT

ChatGPT Can Be Incredibly Misleading and Outright Wrong

I was amazed when starting to use the tool to create ideas for articles and find references for supporting evidence. What I found was that I could never find the linked references for any of the ChatGPT results. A great example is my research on why CMOs of B2B companies have the shortest tenure of all the C-suite roles. ChatGPT came up with surveys and statistics that were not based on any factual truth. Here’s an example:

According to a report by McKinsey, only 16% of B2B companies believe they have a deep understanding of their customers.

ChatGPT can literally make up facts, it's called hallucinating. Read on for more details.

When clicking on the provided reference link, the results page was not found. So I asked ChatGPT to find specific references to this report online and got some great results that also went nowhere.

So I went looking for the report on Google. Nothing. I tried tracking down another similar survey from Forrester that ChatGPT came up with and had the same results.

None of the provided reference links I received from ChatGPT on my queries led to the referenced material. So I went online to see if anyone else was having this sort of trouble and found some interesting facts.

In another recent article, there was another explanation that added more context to the subject:

“Unlike other AI assistants like Siri or Alexa, ChatGPT doesn’t use the internet to locate answers. Instead, it constructs a sentence word by word, selecting the most likely “token” that should come next based on its training. In other words, ChatGPT arrives at an answer by making a series of guesses, which is part of why it can argue wrong answers as if they were completely true.”

ChatGPT Devises Its Own Plan To 'Escape'

Stanford University professor and computational psychologist Michal Kosinski revealed he was alarmed by the capabilities of the latest iteration of the AI chatbot after it followed his prompt to write its own code to run on his computer.

“I am worried that we will not be able to contain AI for much longer,” Kosinksi explained in a Twitter thread.

Additional ChatGPT Facts to Be Aware of

ChatGPT has created content that discriminates against gender, race, and minority groups based on the information it collects from the writing of real humans, which contains biases as well. It should be known that Open AI is trying to address these concerns.
Google is not against AI-generated content but does say, “When it comes to automatically generated content—including AI—to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies.”
The database it draws from is limited to information through 2021

From CNN…

Conclusion

If you review any content created by ChatGPT, not taking it at face value and applying it to your original writing based on the objectives and knowledge you already know, it could help streamline many redundant content tasks and save lots of time. Still, you must always carefully check any generated content for accuracy and bias and use it appropriately to support your writing.

To learn more about how to create highly successful content that is sure to align with your needs, position you as an expert, and never run dry on ideas, please CLICK HERE to schedule a 20-minute strategy session.

ELEVATING CONTENT MARKETING STANDARDS RAISES A CRUCIAL QUESTION:
Why shouldn’t the very act of creating thought leadership content also spark new conversations with in-pipeline deals, top prospects, and high-priority customers for revenue expansion? Or serve as the cornerstone for learning and applying voice-of-customer strategies? That’s the power of ABM Podcasting—engaging B2B buyers and customers in meaningful conversations that uncover essential go-to-market insights, support long sales cycles, reinforce your market perspective, build peer-level trust, and dismantle objections that kill deals.

Steven MacDonald

Steven MacDonald is the founder of Content Strategies, CEO of a MarTech SaaS Company, fractional CMO consulting with leading B2B companies and former Director of Strategy and Client Service at top ten digital marketing agencies.

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.

Steven MacDonald

Follow Steve on LinkedIn.