Exactly on 30 November 2022, ChatGPT went online for the first time and within 2 months broke all world records by gaining over 100 million active users! No app has managed to beat this result - even TikTok took longer, at 9 months.
With the advent of ChatGPT, hopes and fears have risen - work has become easier, but at the same time the tool may pose a threat to certain professional groups. Will this actually happen?
ChatGPT - what is it actually and how does it work?
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a language model that is based on artificial intelligence. It was launched on the market by OpenAI. Its operation looks very similar to standard chatbots - it simply answers the question asked. However, it has some top-down restrictions: it does not give financial advice, nor does it generate content that is considered harmful or false (so-called fake news). There are currently 2 versions available: ChatGPT-3.5 and 4. The GPT-4 version (paid and more advanced) saw the light of day in March 2023.
When asked what it is, ChatGPT version 3.5 answers like this:
ChatGPT can create content that perfectly mimics man-made texts. Behind every conversation we have with ChatGPT are hours of machine training - this involves providing a very large amount of data in text form, which Chat analyses while learning grammar, semantics, word relationships and context. Of course, it is not a perfect creation - it is important to remember that it is an artificial intelligence and does not understand text in the same way as a human, it does not have consciousness and although it is designed to generate consistent and correct answers, it also happens to have less precise ones. Therefore, always check carefully all the information that Chat generates.
How can ChatGPT be used in an online shop?
ChatGPT has many applications that are useful in e-commerce. It can be successfully used for, among other things:
content creation,
creating chatbots,
quick research,
text translation.
It is worth registering and testing for yourself what it is like to work with ChatGPT. It may be hard at first, but practice makes perfect and writing the right prompts will eventually cease to be a problem.
Creating content with ChatGPT
When running your own online shop, it proves to be quite a challenge to create content - especially product descriptions. This is not surprising, there are usually quite a lot of products in the shop, which are very often similar to each other, so creating their descriptions can be overwhelming. Thanks to artificial intelligence, this is no longer a problem. Simply ask ChatGPT to generate a product description, giving it all the important information it should include. This is a very useful tool, especially when working in a dropshipping model, where you are free to use ready-made content provided by wholesalers, but you should try to make the descriptions in your shop or auction unique. So just copy the description from the XML file and ask Chat to rewrite it or write it differently.
In the same way, ChatGPT can generate category descriptions, blog articles and even social media posts or newsletter content. All you need to do is apply the right command and provide it with all the necessary information it should include in the text. This command is expertly called a prompt and, of course, has its own guidelines - above all, use simple, short sentences - the more specific the instruction, the better the answer. Also, don't ask too general questions, don't suggest answers, and try not to use abbreviations or proper names - the chat may simply not understand them.
What does this look like in practice? Let's take a look at what a good prompt and a bad prompt should look like:
This prompt is too general, so ChatGPT has created a post about everything and nothing, on top of which it is too long (you can only see part of it on the screen shot - there are still 3 paragraphs!) - in social media this will not go through.
Here an example of what a good prompt should look like:
Is this the perfect answer? - of course not! Therefore, it is not recommended to publish Chat-generated texts without checking and editing them first.
ChatGPT's limitations
ChatGPT is an advanced language model, but it is not without some limitations. It will sometimes generate answers that are inaccurate, outdated or even completely wrong - mainly because, in answering the questions asked, it relies solely on the data provided to it, which unfortunately may be outdated: ChatGPT-3.5 was trained on data up to 2021, but the newer, paid version can already search the entire Internet and work with attachments.
Remember - ChatGPT will make your job much easier, but it will not do it 100% for you. It is your responsibility to verify everything it generates in response to your questions. Unfortunately, plagiarism does happen, so you need to be very careful about what you publish - it is always a good idea to reword the text generated by the AI.
ChatGPT - opportunity or threat
ChatGPT has raised huge hopes, especially among small business owners who have an additional helper in running their company thanks to AI. AI is the solution to many problems - just enter a simple command and after a while we have a generated product description, category, text for a newsletter or social media posts. This is an incredible saving of time, money and a huge opportunity for the rapid growth of the shop.
However, ChatGPT does not only offer advantages, but also risks, which very many entrepreneurs are not aware of or unfortunately do not want to see. First and foremost, it is unclear from what source Chat draws its information - the developers did not provide the exact database on which ChatGPT was trained. Another problem is inaccurate or even totally false answers - AI is not a perfect creation, it often makes mistakes.
With the development of AI, will there be less work and will some professions disappear? Probably not - ChatGPT is not that advanced and there is no chance that it will replace a copywriter, graphic designer or programmer 100% in the near future - it generates too many errors. However, it will be great as a tool to make work easier.