by Jim January 11, 2023
Welcome back everyone! Happy New Year to you all. AI is the topic on everyone’s lips at the moment, and I think it’s going to have a massive impact on our industry this year. In particular, the chatbot interface called ChatGPT has exploded in popularity. Utilise its power and it can be a great time saver, but I don’t think it will be the Google-killer some think it will. Not yet anyway!
What I learned
- Why ChatGPT is all the rage.
- How it can save you lots of time.
- Why you should avoid mass content creation.
- Some industries will benefit.
- Why it won’t kill off Google.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers. How you going? Happy New Year 2023. It’s going to be a massive year for creativity. Why? AI. So, there were few tools released last year around AI, and we’ll get to the image generation ones next week because that’s just a huge story all on its own.
The Future is Here
But the one that was released in December is called ChatGPT. It was released by a company called OpenAI.com. Go and have a look at them and sign up for an account if you want to use this tool. Basically, it’s an artificial intelligence engine, if you like, with a chatbot interface and it has gone out and scoured the net and ingested and consumed as much as it can. Then you can ask it questions about what it knows or what it can help you with, all sorts of things. So, here’s an example.
Quite often in our business you would have to do little quirky things, which might take a lot of time to do manually. So, you want to build a script for it, but then building the script for it, you’ve got to go and research that, and you’ve got to go to GitHub, Stack Overflow, all these sites to go because you don’t do it that often. And every time, it’s something slightly different. So, in this particular case, I just wanted to scrape a whole lot of URLs off a page, just a simple web scraper, and put them into a CSV file. Nothing fancy. But I couldn’t find it quickly in Google, so I just went to ChatGPT and said, “Hey, I need this,” and it said, “Yeah, here you go. Write it in Python. Here it is.” And then I got stuck installing Python and a few other things and it walked me through that process of installing Python.
Because typically when you’re installing these sorts of things on a command line, you can run into all sorts of problems like paths and all sorts of things. Whereas this tool just walks you through. You give it the problem and it tells you what the problem is, and you move on to the next iteration of whatever you want to do. This one is just another script I’ve got it to create. This is just to check headers to see whether they’re redirecting and also print the output to tell me where they’re redirecting to. I mean, there’s a lot of tools out there that will do that, I know. But this is just something you can have on your desktop. You don’t have to open up a whole app and you can just quickly use it, so that’s why I’ve been creating these little things. I’ve also created a Chrome extension. I’ve also created scripts for organising playlists on YouTube. Obviously, I’ve written content with it, but check this out because that’s one of the main things you’ll hear digital marketers using this for.
Avoid Content Creation
Create huge amounts of content. Please don’t do that. As we’ve discussed before, SEO that is done to, or I should say content that is created purely to get more traffic from Google is not going to convert for e-commerce business owners. We know that. We’ve got the data on it, and it shows. And that’s because that content is helpful to Google users because they’re looking for information and they’re looking to read something. They’re not looking to buy something. And remember, Google is always looking at the searcher’s intent. But this is why we focus so much on SEO when it comes to Google ads. People don’t know that. But your SEO will affect your Google ads. That’s why we brought those two practises together in our business because these machines, and you’ll find it when you start using this actually, you’ll start to see the clunkiness and how prescriptive you have to be in the questions that you ask or how detailed you have to be in the questions that you ask.
Just imagine that this is someone who knows a lot of stuff about everything but is a bit dumb, as well, when it comes to understanding things when you’re trying to talk to it. Even though it is, that’s what it’s meant to be. It’s a ChatGPT. It’s a chatbot. It does chat, but it sometimes will get lost in the conversation and you have to remind it of certain things. So that’s why if you’re just using it to create content and put it out there, it’s not probably going to be the highest quality content unless you spend a few hours on it and really coach it. But what we are finding is you’re better off writing your own content and then asking ChatGPT for suggestions on how to improve it. For instance, I said I’ve got a video to record. What sorts of things could I talk about that would be thought provoking and perhaps uncommon perspectives that my audience hadn’t heard about? And it suggested these six things. Basically, some of them are a little bit meh, but most of them are pretty good.
It’s Coming for our Jobs!
It talks about a lot of people saying AI is going to take everyone’s jobs. I think it’s going to take some people’s jobs, but I think it’s going to make a lot of people’s jobs a lot easier. And I’m saying to people, AI is a little bit like a better paintbrush. It has some dangers as well, which we’ll get into, probably not this week, but it’s a bit like a new paintbrush. So, when Photoshop first came out, we didn’t see the death of graphic designers or digital artists. We saw the increase of them. People who weren’t used to using a computer though, they got left behind, if they were just offline artists. So, an artist can use Photoshop, I can use Photoshop, I can use GIMP, but I’m not an artist. And an artist can use those tools way better than what I can. The same thing applies to a lot of the AI stuff.
It’s the old programming acronym, GIGO, garbage in, garbage out. So, the information that you ask or the questions that you ask is going to dictate the content that you get out of it. Other things that we’ve used it for, that we’re using it on client sites for, is categorising key words and key phrases that are driving traffic versus ones that are say maybe driving traffic and converting. What’s a transactional search phrase versus an informational search phrase? Those sorts of things. That’s giving you some really interesting insights. Obviously, I’ve used it to write ads, but check your copy. Always check your copy, make sure you’re happy with it. One of the things I did get it to do was… Not that one. That’s another bit of code. One of the things I did get it to do was summarise my book. So, I uploaded a 30,000-word book on SEO, and I said, can you summarise this book please?
It came back and it was spot on. It did everything. It knew within seconds what the book was about, which was disconcerting. I was hoping it might have taken a little bit more time having to think about it, but no it didn’t. It came back and gave me 10 bullet points of what the book’s about. I’m not going to show you those because then you don’t have to buy the book. But go and have a look at this. I said to the staff yesterday, businesses that aren’t using this, especially in our industry, are just going to get left behind because it allows you to do so much more, faster and it just frees you up to do other things. That’s what I **** about it. The scary side of it is that it gets a lot of things wrong. It’s got human intervention. It seems a little bit biased to whoever the developer is or whatever the sensor is at the top of the AI chain in this situation is.
Will it kill Google?
But there are also some very, very clever and creative ways of getting more out of the tool by telling it things like, assume you are an expert in this topic. Give me some advice on this topic. So, it will go and do things like that. People have said, “Oh, it’s going to be the death of Google as well, because I can just type anything in here and it will help me find it.” That is true, but I would also say that Google doesn’t make money from me searching for scripts on how to scrape URLs off a web page, although someone did say that they do make ads on the destination site that you hit to get that script, which is true. Thank you, Nick, for pointing that out. But what is very interesting is that Bing, which is Microsoft, is an investor in OpenAI, Bing is going to be incorporating ChatGPT into the search engine.
How that’s going to manifest, I’m not sure, but I guess the next step for Google would be turning it into a chatbot and really having zero click results because that’s what this is. This is zero click results. This isn’t sending me to any webpages when I ask these questions. Just give me the answer. Whereas Google is finding the answer and sending you to it. Google makes its money mainly from people buying and selling things though. So, it’s going to be an interesting space this year. Keep an eye on it. Go and have a look at this tool. Have a look at Stable Diffusion.
If you’re a little bit nerdy, a little bit techy, go and have a look at Stable Diffusion. That’s the open-source version of AI. So, it’s a little bit clunkier, but yeah, it’s mind blowing. I haven’t been this giddy about the Internet since 1996, but I’m also incredibly scared and worried about the power of these tools. I’d **** to know what you think. I’d **** to know how you are using it, especially ChatGPT. If you want to have a look at some of the image ones, go and have a look at Stable Diffusion. I think it’s Dream Studio I think is the application there for images. Midjourney is another one for images. And of course, DALL-E, D-A-double L-E for images, which is part of the OpenAI platform. Hopefully that’s helpful. Let me know what you think.
I’m really interested in what people are using it for. If you are in Melbourne, let us know because there’s a few of us that hope to get a meetup happening around AI and what’s happening with that and hear from interesting people who are doing interesting things. So please let me know if you are in Melbourne and you’re interested in catching up for that session because yeah, that’d be great just to chat with people and find out how they’re using it. Follow me on Twitter @jimboot because I’m sharing stuff that I find there on AI and other people. Just the best place I’m finding at the moment is Twitter for discovery of things around AI and ChatGPT. So, get on there, if you’re not already, and hit me up. Thanks very much and we’ll see you next week. Bye-bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
