The insightful musings of tech writer Stephen Wolfram underscore my belief that using ChatGPT or any other LLM for ad writing will almost certainly create predictable ads that blur you into your category. The goal of an ad writer is to differentiate the brand, not make it sound similar to all the others.
– Roy H. Williams
On February 14, 2023, Wolfram wrote, “What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?” This is from his introduction to that work:
“The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a ‘reasonable continuation’ of whatever text it’s got so far, where by ‘reasonable’ we mean ‘what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.'”
“So let’s say we’ve got the text ‘The best thing about AI is its ability to’. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with ‘probabilities’.”
If I understand what Wolfram is saying – and I believe I do – then ChatGPT will allow average ad writers to more quickly and easily write the same predictable ads they have always written.
This means you must prepare yourself,
brave reader, for the droning of adolescent
Avertising to forever keep playing
that same, inescapable note
on its terrible, 2-dollar
flutophone.
– Roy
NOTE: Wizard of Ads partners are not average ad writers.