Since ChatGPT took the internet by storm in December, there’s been plenty of talk around it—how is it setting the tone for future AI developments? Is it unethical to use it? How can it be adapted for use across different industries? And how much should professionals rely on it?

At its core, ChatGPT is a language genie, spitting out iteration after iteration at break-neck speed to meet any brief fed to it. Whether you need an email, a framework or a recipe built around the ingredients you have at hand, ChatGPT always has words to give.

But those words tend to fall a bit short, and the difference often comes down to quality versus quantity. Can ChatGPT write more content than any human within a certain amount of time? Absolutely.

But can it inherently deliver qualities like emotion and personality the way a human can? Not really.

Take a look at this example of ChatGPT versus Human.

Source: The Very Good Copy newsletter by Eddie Shleyner

It’s a clear difference of “show, don’t tell” where the chatbot relies on describing an emotion rather than evoking it. So while it may seem like ChatGPT can grant all our linguistic wishes when prompted correctly, it’s more than a stone’s throw away from writing the level of prose that we often seek.

This begs the question… can ChatGPT take up the mantle of assistant?

Whether you’re a strategist, project head, writer or other, here are three ways anyone can use ChatGPT to make their job easier:

1. It’s a great research buddy

A couple of weeks ago, two of our strategists were working on a brief for a B2B social account. Part of their task included building a narrative around their proposed platform. Time was ticking (as it so often does in an agency) and they needed research to draw insights from.

Enter ChatGPT.

One prompt and a few seconds were all it took for the bot to curate an extra set of data points for our strategists to play around with. Emphasis on extra because (1) ChatGPT’s information is outdated, (2) like Bing’s AI so publicly showed everyone, you can’t take AI-generated information at face value; fact-checking is key, and (3) this is just another tool in a researcher’s belt—definitely not the first and last step.

2. Writer’s block? Worry not

Not everyone’s a writer but everyone has had to write at one point or another. It could be an email or a tweet, a review or a response… whatever it is, chances are high that you’ve been stuck with your words at some point—not knowing how to start, how to shorten, how to carry the right tone, etc.

But with ChatGPT, you can definitely find a starting point to get you going. Here’s a great example from the CEO of a product design agency using the chatbot to work around a pressing business issue.

3. Ideas, ideas, ideas

You won’t stumble across an award-winning campaign but if you’re looking to piece together a simple content calendar for yourself, your brand or a client, ChatGPT is a good place as any to get the ideas flowing.

Basic? Yes, but like the other two approaches, this is also meant to be just a starting point, leaving room for the prompt to be niched down and fleshed out as needed.

And basic is, to a degree, the name of the ChatGPT game. There are endless uses for it (such as language translation and practising prompt engineering) but at the end of the day, this AI tool is still in its beginnings, making it a relatively dependable, inherently useful, but still primitive tool in your marketing belt.