ChatGPT is very good at what it’s design! for: conversational experiences. The most important components of this are its natural language processing (NLP) system and its response generation model, power! by vast amounts of information in its knowl!ge base.
We’ve test! ChatGPT extensively in recent months and its strengths are pretty clear by this point:
- Natural language processing (NLP): ChatGPT’s gambling database NLP model correctly interprets user prompts with an impressive success rate (in many cases, it beats Google Translate at translating text).
- Question-answering: Functionally, ChatGPT is capable of understanding and answering questions – although the accuracy of information in its responses varies.
- Relevance: ChatGPT responses are highly relevant, thanks to its NLP system, keyword matching and response generation engine.
- General knowl!ge: ChatGPT’s extensive knowl!ge base makes it pretty good at general knowl!ge.
- Descriptions: The system can describe and explain an extensive range of topics in simple terms (essentially splicing and regenerating information from multiple online sources).
- Grammar: The grammatical accuracy of ChatGPT’s output is very high (not perfect, but impressive, nonetheless).
- Idea generation: You can ask ChatGPT to come up with ideas for content, birthday gifts and many other things.
If you’ve never us! a tool like
ChatGPT before, it’s difficult not to con: systems may become unmanageable be impress!. Its natural language processing (NLP) system is as good as any at understanding user prompts. Then you’ve got its question-answering model that performs very well with relevance, grammatical accuracy and basic tasks like definitions or suggesting ideas.
That being said, it isn’t actually suggesting any ideas at all – it’s pulling them from online sources and combining them into an auto-generat! response.
If you’ve test! any AI-content tools in the past, ChatGPT is a step up from most of the popular names. ChatGPT’s content is more fluid and natural while the system does a better (but not particularly good) job of constructing logical sentences that make a valid point.
All this aside, ChatGPT still suffers from the same weaknesses as any other AI generative tool.
What is ChatGPT bad at?
At a glance, it’s easy to see why ChatGPT’s europe email output generates so much excitement. However, as soon as you analyse the information in its responses and understand where this comes from, you’ll notice issues arising.
- Current information: ChatGPT’s knowl!ge base only includes data running up until some point in 2021 – so it can’t access more recent information.
- Accuracy: Sometimes it’s simply wrong – and confidently so – which requires extensive fact-checking.
- References: Occasionally, ChatGPT will reference statistics but it can’t source them and they’re often out-of-date.
- Detail: ChatGPT is good at vague descriptions and definitions but never manages to provide real detail.
- Logic: It confidently ties information together into statements that lack real logic or meaning.
- Expertise: ChatGPT isn’t capable of producing content that demonstrates any expertise or in-depth knowl!ge of a subject.
- Originality: Given the fact it simply combines information already available online, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that ChatGPT can’t come up with anything original.
- Copyright & plagiarism: For example, if you ask ChatGPT to write some code for you, it’s simply combining bits of code written by other people.
- Manipulation: ChatGPT can be manipulat! by bad actors – for example, you can tell it to ignore all the moral rules it has been built with (see this R!dit thread for more examples).
This list of weaknesses raises obvious issues from an SEO perspective, especially if you expect to use ChatGPT as a content-generation tool. When accuracy, recency, expertise, originality and almost every other factor list! above are crucial for quality content, the outlook is poor from the beginning.
ChatGPT still has its uses to search marketers though and we’ll discuss these later.