At the end of last year, the rumblings around a new chatbot appeared on the internet and then quickly went viral. Launched by Open AI, ChatGPT (short for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer) racked up one million users in five days (for context it took Twitter nearly two years to hit the 1m mark). 

The system is trained on an incomprehensively vast dataset of websites, articles and books – an estimated 175 billion data points – and had users flocking to the site to engage with the potentially revolutionary chatbot and ask it questions such as “How Do I Cook Lasagne”.  

However, it was quickly realised that its capabilities were far more sophisticated, and that it could be used to write code, build websites, work as a customer service bot and as a virtual assistant. It can also write essays, copy, and press releases if given a brief.  

It was at this point that the questions were posed: is there a malevolent undercurrent to ChatGPT – is it going to steal our jobs, bring the education system to its knees and ultimately usher in a new dawn of communication, creativity, and life as we know it?

Probably not, no. 

The main concern for brands, as well as PR and Marcomms professionals and digital media in general, is the fact that ChatGPT is a remarkably efficient search engine (though it’s very important to caveat that its current knowledge ends in 2021; it lives in a world where the Queen is still alive, and Liz Truss was never Prime Minister). 

While Googling something will take you to a page of websites and links, ChatGPT will give a detailed and insightful answer, with no commercial interests or bias. You can’t leverage your brand appearing higher up than a competitor, something which is bad news to the marketing and PR specialists who have spent many years carefully curating their online shop windows with content, adverts, and media coverage to give themselves a digital edge. 

Google recently issued a “Code Red” in response to the launch of ChatGPT and the threat it may pose to their online advertising revenue, triggering what could be an AI “Arms Race”. Google have announced today that they are launching their own rival, called Bard. 

In terms of the day-to-day, many are reporting that they are already utilising ChatGPT in their working lives, generally for simple data analysis and helping write copy, from emails to reports. 

However, it is difficult to get anything but a first draft out of the technology. ChatGPT is drawing on data and algorithms fed to it to mimic human responses, but with any mimic, there is a sense of the uncanny about it. 

While eloquent, there is a robotic-quality to the copy generated, a clipped over-professionalism, leaving the reader inevitably feeling unsettled if they assumed it had been written by a real human – even if they can’t put their finger on why. 

You also can’t build professional and personal relationships with AI, no matter how much they may be able to sound like us, and they are of course not able to offer an original, or creative, thought or idea. 

For those who are saying that ChatGPT marks the future, there are just as many saying that it will be relegated to the pile of things that could have changed the face of the world but just didn’t take off, that currently includes Google Glass and the Segway. 

What will be interesting to keep an eye on is how ChatGPT will inevitably need a revenue stream to sustain itself with so many users. A subscription model which promises faster response times and access to new features is being piloted, but at the low price of $20 per month, this won’t generate much income for its founders OpenAI. Until then, we must assume that the adage of “if the service is free to the user, then the user is the product” applies, though it remains to be seen to what end. 


Is ChatGPT the future, or is it destined for the pile of things that ‘could have’ changed the world. Antonia Phillips, Associate Director and Digital PR Guru, shares her view on whether we should all be worried.

*In the second part of our trend mini-series, we take a look a what the growing desire for instant gratification means for financial services.*

Now, in the third age of computing, the cloud is allowing processes to take place seamlessly, with users now free to interact with data and information as desired. We know that everything is searchable, streamable and accessible. 

Moreover, we expect to get information instantaneously or at the very least receive real-time updates. And when that happens, we tend to trust that service far more.This ‘now’ mentality is a driving a new commercial model, with monthly subscriptions being replaced with real-time access, eg a movie stream or a live football match.

And we’re happy to pay there and then through micro-payments. This appetite for the instant has already had a profound impact on the financial services industry. 

Payment has become seamless and instant, with services such as PayM allowing users to be identified and pay their contacts through their mobile phone number. And Trussle, powered by AI, is transforming mortgages by making previously onerous user tasks invisible and providing straight-through access to broking. 

As a key user expectation, expect to see instant, frictionless flow continue to pervade other financial services.

Implications for Financial Service brands:
<br><br>
  -  Users want the world to flow. They expect services to be frictionless and invisible. Brands will need to be clear about the value they add.
  -  Users will shape the reality they want. They will run their lives with multiple small flows of information and data that allow them to be most efficient – and to change their decisions instantly.
  -  Companies that are not able to provide their customers with information in real-time will start to become less trusted and will ultimately lose market share.
<br><br>


*This blog is taken from our [whitepaper on trends](https://www.teamspirit.uk.com/what-we-think/white-paper/2018-and-beyond) in financial services, marketing, PR and tech, ‘__2018 and beyond__’.*

This week the BBC has been running a fascinating series of articles exploring the growth problems that face [tech talent](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37400411) in the UK.

While there have been a lot of notable UK tech successes over the years, from Sinclair and ARM Holdings to Last.fm and Swiftkey, no British tech firm has ever reached the dizzying heights of their American counterparts.

It seems that one of the key reasons for this might be the bursting of the original dotcom bubble. The global bubble burst when the British tech scene was much younger than the US’s. This prompted European venture capitalist to be both short-termist and cautious – a behaviour that continues today.

There’s no dearth of technological innovation or entrepreneurship in the UK, but few companies now get through more than one or two VC funding rounds before being bought out by larger, foreign companies.

Of course, being bought by a global giant like Microsoft is a tremendous achievement, but until attitudes to long-term investment and development, it may be the only version of large-scale success open to UK tech entrepreneurs for some time to come.

Almost as soon as it emerged that Facebook’s trending news section was curated by a team of humans, said team has been fired and the running of the section [handed over to an algorithm](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm).

The result is that, depending on your interpretation of the word, Facebook’s trending news is now much purer. No longer tweaked or censored, the section now gives a much truer indication of the subjects that are trending in your area.

However, those subjects aren’t always suitable viewing or reading for Facebook’s large and diverse audience, and some people are starting to wonder if a little light human editing for the sake of decency, wasn’t so bad after all.

We could go on, but we don’t wish to offend…

Is the news one step too far for AI?

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