Can A Robot Write Your Marketing?

A new artificial intelligence model spits out content like nothing before. Some say that as far as business tools go, it could be the last word.

- Liz Brody

In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less. So began an innocuous post on the otherwise obscure blog Nothing But Words in July 2020 that managed to make headlines from MIT Technology Review to NBC. Why? Because while scores of humans debated its content, it turned out most of the words weren't actually written by a human at all. They were penned by an artificial intelligence model called GPT-3, and posted by Liam Porr, a student at UC Berkeley at the time. The way he saw it, GPT-3 is about to change the way we write, and this blog post became high-profile proof.

Many people agree-and that's now raising some interesting business questions. When software can write almost as well as a human, how will that alter the way marketing copy is created, how brands communicate, and perhaps even how they interact with customers? Some entrepreneurs, like Dave Rogenmoser, founder of a marketing company called Jarvis, are already exploring that answer. His software, powered by GPT-3, writes just about anything for his clients-from emails to website content to full-length books. GPT-3 gets you 80% there,” he says.

So what exactly is GPT3? It's the third iteration of an Al language model called generative pre-trained transformer (or GPT), which was created by OpenAI, an AI research lab whose founders include Elon Musk. GPT-3 was released in June 2020 after being trained on hundreds of billions of words from the internet and volumes of books. (An updated model called InstructGPT has since followed.) It works by being given prompts. A user could type a few sentences into GPT-3say, the beginning of a blog post or a sales pitch for a product-and then define some parameters, like how long GPT-3 should go for.