I had beers with a couple of friends last Thursday. One of them just launched a redesign of their business website. His last major obstacle was that he needed to write his "about us" page. Rather than actually write it though, he recorded a short audio file where he talked about his company's history. Then he uploaded it to Otter.ai, a transcription software to convert it to text. He fed the text into Chat GPT and told it to organize it and re-write it with a more professional tone. He tweaked that output and then posted it on his website.
This entire process took him around half an hour and required little skill on his part.
You've probably seen stories about Chat GPT, the artificial intelligence that the OpenAI produced. With a few written prompts, it can do a wide variety of tasks, including creative ones, to a good and sometimes excellent level of quality.
It's not hyperbole to say that it and its successors will transform our world in marvelous (and terrifying) ways.
In Marketing General's 2022 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report (Marketing General Incorporated) association executives ranked "Competitive association(s) or sources of information" as the third hardest challenge they faced behind the pandemic and the accompanying recession.
Chat GPT is going to exponentially increase the quality, sources, and amount of information.
There's an old proverb that if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and a thousand years they'll write the entire works of Shakespeare. This is the "Infinite Monkey Theorum." It's a shorthand description of probability.
Functionally though, the outcome will be similar to what Chat GPT provides: an excellent product with no skill required. Limitless volumes of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter available to anyone with a computer, including your competitors.
The silver lining is that Chat GPT is just a tool. We obsess over tools because they provide us leverage, but tools don't actually solve problems, people do.
A smartphone and Tinder can magically provide you with a pool of people you could date, but they're not going to land you a romantic partner.
Similarly, Chat GPT will make it easier for anyone to produce content, but it can't make it exciting, relevant, insightful, or interesting. That's still on your shoulders.
As a community, associations have had and continue to enjoy big advantages over other sources of information. Those advantages will continue in the post Chat GPT world. In the follow on article, I'll explore what those are and how you can employ them to rise above the competitive noise.
