5 Things ChatGPT Can Do & 5 Things It Can’t

According to recent IBM research, 35% of all businesses incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations. Among the latest and most popular examples of AI technology, ChatGPT uses conversational language to respond to questions and prompts in much the same way a real person would. It has all kinds of uses and applications for marketing and content teams, but it should be used with caution in many content-related situations.

Graph of AI usage in marketing by business size, though not all are appropriate answers to the question what can ChatGPT do?

Image Source: The CMO Survey

If you’ve heard the hype surrounding this open-access AI chatbot, you may wonder if it would benefit you or your company. After all, it’s free (for now), which can be tough to pass up. However, before diving into the technology, you should ask: What can ChatGPT do for me, and what are its limitations?

We’re going to dig into this in detail below, but before we do, I should mention that many of these new AI tools can be integrated directly within your marketing tech stack. AI platform developers are regularly launching new integrations, browser extensions, and API connectors, so you may want to find out if they can be used within your existing tools.

Just as an example, tools like Grammarly, Jasper, Writer, and Copysmith already integrate seamlessly within DivvyHQ. If you’d like to see how they work, just schedule a demo and we’ll give you a quick tour. We’re hopeful that ChatGPT will have similar integration capabilities soon.

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What Can ChatGPT Do?

ChatGPT arrived on the scene at the end of 2022, but OpenAI, the company that created the tool, based it on a GPT 3.5-series model. So, while it’s the new kid in town, it uses the same model as other existing AI tools, including Jasper AI, a social media content generator that helps marketers stay on top of social media posts.

This tool allows users to input a prompt or a question, and the chatbot provides a long-form response. It generates its responses based on iterative training but does not have internet or specific file access.

Many companies use AI in their marketing efforts, but most of ChatGPT’s applications are inappropriate for marketing. We’re here to answer the question: What can ChatGPT do for marketing teams? Check out these five possibilities.

1. Generate Headlines

When asking what can ChatGPT do for content marketing, it’s essential to understand that the tool is generally better for tasks that a human can quickly review for quality. If you want a list of potential headlines, the chatbot can generate them faster than even the most creative minds can work, leaving your team to choose the best ones.

2. Suggest Keyword Term Synonyms

ChatGPT is great with synonyms. When you need to come up with alternatives for root keywords, simply enter the term or phrase and tell the chatbot what you’re looking for. You can comb the list for the most relevant results to beef up optimization for websites, blogs, landing pages, and ads.

3. Create Content Outlines

While ChatGPT doesn’t allow your marketing team to collaborate online, individuals can collaborate with the chatbot to flesh out content ideas and create an outline. The process is an iterative exchange between the writer and the chatbot that can produce an outline with established headers and subheaders.

4. Create Alternative FAQs

What can ChatGPT do to improve the FAQ sections on your website? It works much the same as coming up with synonym keywords, providing alternative ways to ask the same question. The chatbot can also help you generate questions based on a root keyword.

5. Compose and Debug Simple Code

One of the more valuable tasks ChatGPT can do within a marketing context is to compose and debug simple code. Since most marketers aren’t seasoned programmers, ChatGPT can be a great resource to help you both generate code and find errors in programming languages that are commonly used for building websites, querying databases, and doing marketing data analysis.

ChatGPT example of generating HTML and CSS code

Instead of writing code in HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, RegEx, or Python, just tell ChatGPT what you want to see and it will write the code for you.

What Can’t ChatGPT Do? Or… What Should You NOT Use It For?

With the online community raving about the power of ChatGPT, you need to understand its limitations before deciding whether your team wants to use it for marketing purposes.

An important part of understanding it’s limitations is understanding how these large language models work. To quickly summarize, these models are trained by consuming most of the words on the public internet and then learning how those words are contextually related. Then, when given a question or prompt, the AI returns a response that it has calculated to be the most accurate answer.

But here’s the issue… Should you trust everything you read on the internet? Hell no. Well, these AI models don’t know not to trust what it is learning.

So this is your warning. Just because you can ask ChatGPT a question, and it will give you an answer that it thinks is accurate, doesn’t mean that you should trust it blindly. Here are a few things that ChatGPT shouldn’t be used to do.

1. Conduct Research

While you can make the case that ChatGPT has already scoured the internet and would likely be a great resource to help you with research, you have to be careful here. It only has access to the information it has been trained on. And the internet has no shortage of misinformation, inaccuracies, and bias.

The information it has stored is also not as fresh or as timely as a search on Google or social platforms. For example, if you’re wanting to learn about something that happened in the world in the last few days or weeks, it’s likely going to return inaccurate information (or tell you it doesn’t know anything about that).

2. Discern Fact From Fiction

ChatGPT learns fast, and it has been trained on vast amounts of data, but it doesn’t know how to discern fact from fiction. You can ask it to write a blog post with supporting facts, and it may provide content that sounds great, but is absolutely untrue.

3. Convey Human Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust

The program uses natural language, but what can ChatGPT do to convey human qualities such as experience, expertise, authority, and trust? Quite simply: It can’t.

Creating content that lacks these elements provides a poor content experience and puts your brand’s reputation at risk. There are several reasons to be wary of using AI for content creation, including ChatGPT, and this limitation is one of the big ones.

4. Write Long-Form Content

There is dedicated content writing software on the market designed specifically for helping with certain aspects of writing social media posts, blog articles, and other content. However, none of these create a polished end product. ChatGPT is the same.

If you use the chatbot to create an asset — particularly long-form content — you might receive something with superficially great-sounding sentences that don’t make any sense. ChatGPT is good at producing fluff.

5. Perform Marketing Tasks

ChatGPT can’t do marketing. You may be able to harness its rapid responses for very limited components of the content marketing process, but it can’t perform marketing tasks such as generating leads.

Only your team has the skills and expertise to perform complex marketing tasks. However, Divvy’s content marketing solutions can help.

What Can ChatGPT Do Along With the Divvy Platform?

ChatGPT’s platform is external to the Divvy platform. While it doesn’t yet integrate with Divvy, you can apply the results from your ChatGPT queries or exercises in the relevant component of your Divvy account.

Divvy allows your team to collaborate, ideate, create, schedule, and analyze your marketing content. Integrations with various AI tools can speed up the process and reduce the use of human resources for many of the tedious tasks like developing outlines, editing, checking for style, and writing drafts of short-form assets.

As mentioned earlier, DivvyHQ integrates with Grammarly, Jasper AI, and Writer to help your content creators and editors craft stellar assets.

If you still find that you are asking what can ChatGPT do, you could give it a test run. However, you may find that without the ability to integrate with your systems, the extra steps reduce your team’s efficiency. For an efficient and effective content operations platform, DivvyHQ has the automation and integration capabilities you need. Request a demo to see how it works!