These platforms are known as natural language models—a sub-genre of GenAI which is set to transform the content creation landscape.
Rather than dive down a digital rabbit hole of endless iterations and adaptations, this report will focus on the fundamental capabilities of two major contenders—ChatGPT and Gemini—and seek to identify challenges and opportunities for copywriting and content creation represented by GenAI platforms.
“When you talk to it, it instantly processes your input and tries to generate the most appropriate and informative response, drawing upon its massive knowledge base.”
It’s like having a conversation with a super-informed friend who has read a lot but doesn’t have personal feelings or consciousness. That’s ChatGPT, a product of OpenAI’s efforts to push the boundaries of natural language processing and understanding.”
ChatGPT offers a mature, compelling, and impressive GenAI solution, with prompts offering an impressive range of opportunities—writing a poem, providing explanations of topics, creating ‘ideas’, and more. One core limitation of ChatGPT’s free version is it has a static learning model, meaning the information it leverages to produce answers is cut off from a specific ‘learning point’.
The subscription product of ChatGPT, the aptly named ChatGPT Plus, offers premium access. Crucially, it also enables web search functionality, catapulting ChatGPT’s knowledge into the present day. Don’t count your chickens yet though, thanks to its close partnership with Microsoft, the ChatGPT web search model operates on the Bing platform. While not without its supporters, 2019 research by Stanford Internet Observatory highlighted Bing displayed an “alarming amount of disinformation and misinformation in response to user queries.” Whether you trust those responses or not is a fundamental question hovering above the GenAI revolution.
A clear example of the challenge of GenAI and unintended consequences is that, as of July 2023, ChatGPT Browse function was disabled due to its ability to bypass paywalls and display content that content owners had set clear access limitations on. Ethical practice and complex content ownership is a key theme throughout this report, and one highlighted by many industry stakeholders we spoke to. Live search returned as a beta function to ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise versions as of September 2023.
Gemini is the evolution of Google’s original Bard GenAI product, now handily (unless you’ve just written an extensive whitepaper on ‘Bard’…) renamed to Gemini—the name of the underlying AI model used for the tool. It is “trained to understand and process multiple types of information, not just text, but also images, audio, video, and even code. This makes them multimodal.”
The release of Google Gemini offered a step-change in Google’s GenAI capabilities, and a worthy rival to ChatGPT. The most powerful Gemini Advanced is a premium model with a price point to rival ChatGPT Plus, and capabilities that compete admirably against its arguably more headline-grabbing rival.
While Google Gemini Advanced is a powerful tool, its image creation capabilities are a little less smooth than the DALL-E options integrated with ChatGPT Plus, and its language and translation capabilities also seem to take a little more prompting to deliver higher quality. However, where it excels over its rival is real-time information leveraging Google’s huge toolbox of search and maps capabilities, making it a powerful platform for both personal and business research.
One of the more disruptive transformations in the landscape is likely to come with the full integration of GenAI capabilities into Microsoft’s Office suite of products, meaning GenAI capabilities will be plug-and-play in the world’s most popular word processor—Microsoft Word. Future integration of GenAI capabilities into Google’s collaborative Google Docs platform will likely represent an equally seismic shift, and one which will almost certainly leverage the learnings and development from Google’s Gemini.
