February 2023

https://youtu.be/Ui1pNLJlse4 Small to Mid-Sized Businesses, Law Firms, Financial Advisors, CEOs, and Brands Could Be at Risk While pondering AI ChatGPT, here’s a “Domesday” scenario to consider: what if your carefully curated online presence–your website, social media platforms, and client engagement–is a risk of disappearing? Or what if you decided to use AI to save money to write blogs, generate images or create autorespond bots for your business but when the poor quality is detected by clients, this leads to online reputation damage? This might not be as far-fetched as you think. The advent of the plethora of AI tools can actually lead to a negative web presence, especially as AI gets deployed and integrated deeper into search engines and browsers. Note: that while there are many text-based AI-tools, for simplicity, we\’ll mostly focus on ChatGPT. Other AI Tools ChatGPT DALL-E 2 Jasper AI Repurpose IO Jenni AI Murf AI Writing Checker Tome  Informational Links What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business  JPMorgan restricts employee use of ChatGPT Vanderbilt University apologizes after using ChatGPT to console students  How Is This Applicable to You? AI tools like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Jasper AI, Midjourney, Repurpose IO, Jenni AI, Murf, AI Content Checker, and Tome (and many more) are transforming the business and online landscapes. Understanding their implications is crucial for everyone, regardless of your interest, usage or experience with AI. Even if you\’re skeptical or indifferent to AI tools, it\’s essential to recognize the potential impact of the content they generate. In fact, you\’re likely already using AI in some capacity—spellcheck and auto-correct are just a few examples that have been around for years. As AI continues to shape the future of online search, staying informed about these tools and their potential consequences is critical, particularly for those who may be unaware of the risks and opportunities associated with generated content. Embracing this new era of AI-driven answers requires both caution and adaptability to safeguard your online presence and reputation. Is Online Search Changing? Online search will drastically change in the future, and with it, your online reputation. Also, there are ways your web presence can actually be damaged by ChatGPT, such as using poorly written unedited AI content or not being found in AI answers by would-be clients. This is especially crucial for mid-sized brands, small businesses, financial advisors, law firms, physicians, CEOs, and professionals, i.e., any business that is not literally at the very top in its industry. What is ChatGPT? First, what is it? By now, you\’ve come across AI and ChatGPT, an exponentially expanding platform that has garnered approximately 5 million users within just a few months and currently has about 180 million users. Individuals and businesses alike are utilizing it for answering technical questions, crafting articles, and even composing poetry in iambic pentameter. Though still somewhat in its early stages, AI, and ChatGPT in particular, are poised to revolutionize how we make and access information. Experience it for yourself: visit the ChatGPT site, ask a question about your business or personal life, and see what emerges. Two immediate observations are: one, conducting a search, similar to one used for Google, yields results that rarely mention a a specific brand, and two, almost never provide a website hyperlink. These are immediate problems for businesses. How Does ChatGPT Work? ChatGPT gathers information from billions of words across sources such as Wikipedia, books, news articles, and scientific journals. Developed by OpenAI, this language model employs ways to generate human-like text.   I asked ChatGPT itself how it worked, but the answer to me personally was unhelpful and slightly baffling: ChatGPT is a type of language model developed by OpenAI, which is based on the Transformer architecture and uses deep learning techniques to generate text. Here\’s a high-level overview of how it works: Data Preparation: The model is trained on a massive dataset of text, which is preprocessed and cleaned to remove any irrelevant or duplicate information. Tokenization: The text data is then split into individual tokens, such as words or subwords, and these tokens are then assigned unique numerical IDs. Model Training: The model is trained on the tokenized data, where it learns to predict the next word in a sequence based on the context of the surrounding words. The model is trained using a variant of the transformer architecture, which allows it to learn relationships between tokens across large distances in the input sequence. Inference: When the model is used for inference or generating text, it takes an initial seed of text, such as a prompt or question, and generates subsequent text tokens one at a time, using the probabilities generated by the model during training. The process continues until the model reaches a stopping criterion, such as a maximum length for the generated sequence or a specific end-of-sequence token. Text Generation: The generated tokens are then decoded back into human-readable text, and the final generated text is returned as the output. Overall, the ChatGPT model is designed to generate text that is contextually relevant and coherent, given an input prompt. The training process allows the model to learn patterns and relationships in the text data, and use that knowledge to generate text that is similar in style and content. After this example, you might think that AI-written text will never work or is too technical–but we’ll see other examples below.  To get a comparison, I went to Google, and asked the same question, but ended up with hundreds of links and a still unclear answer. This exercise itself seems to be emblematic of the ChatGPT vs traditional online search experience: one concise answer or many spammy links. What is the Near Future of AI and ChatGPT? ChatGPT is offered as a standalone application, premium paid versions, and integrated into Bing\’s search engine and Microsoft\’s Edge browser. It\’s not hard to imagine that these developments could significantly impact online reputation management for businesses. Seamless integration into internet searches