Special Issue: GPT-4 News, Overview & Plugins

Author

Sam Woods
March 25, 2023

Good morning,

Just as I finished this special issue on GPT-4, and was about to hit send, OpenAI released plugins.

And for the first time in the 7 or 8 years that I’ve been using AI for various marketing and creative work, I’m beginning to see where this ends.

When GPT-3 came out in 2020, I was convinced that marketing (along with writing and any creative work) has fundamentally changed in ways we don’t understand yet.

We’re going to spend the next few months and years coming to terms with just what the heck is going on—and how to move forward with work, like marketing (this goes for any form of work and life in general, too).

It’s easy to dismiss ChatGPT and GPT-4 as “not sentient”.

And while it’s true in the human definition of sentience, you need to know that GPT-4 is displaying Theory of Mind capabilities (that is, the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them).

I’m going to say that again:

GPT-4 is displaying cognitive capabilities that (so far) only humans are thought to possess.

Again, it’s not performing them in the way humans do. It’s not smart, sentient, or capable of emotions. At the end of the day, it’s an exceptional text predictor, technically speaking.

But what we’re seeing is emergent behavior.

Unless you’re told that you’re chatting with GPT-4, you’ll have no clue you are.

Unless you’re told that you’re seeing ads, emails, articles, sales pages written by GPT-4, you’ll have no clue you are.

When I say that AI tools like GPT-4 can write copy and create marketing assets as well as humans can—it’s because it can.

It can even do as well, or better, than humans on tests like BAR, LSAT, GRE, and so on.

In a minute, you’ll see a paper that claims GPT-4 “could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”

Does it matter that “under the hood”, it’s not thinking or feeling in the same way as a human, when what you get is the same or similar output?

I’d argue that it does matter.

But, when it comes to marketing (and copywriting), I’m not sure it does.

If ChatGPT can write short-form and long-form copy that’s indistinguishable from a human, then what’s stopping you (or your competitors) from having it do so?

Here’s GPT-3.5 writing an email, with no previous seeding or stacking prompts:

Not bad.

And here’s GPT-4 writing an email, with the same prompt:

It hits differently, doesn’t it?

Not only is GPT-4 a leap forward for marketers and copywriters (and, really, everyone).

But now plugins are coming, too.

First, let me give you an overview of GPT-4 so you understand it better (and see how it can be leveraged for marketing and copywriting).

Let’s dive in.

GPT-4 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Let’s get you up-to-speed:

  • GPT-4 is available to ChatGPT Plus users, and API access is being rolled out.

  • For those who don’t know, ChatGPT runs on either GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. You can select which model you want (GPT-3.5 or GPT-4).

  • The announcement tweet got 4x more likes than the same for ChatGPT, itself the biggest story of 2022.

In the announcement, OpenAI focused on what GPT-4 can do. They worked with other companies to launch it and showed examples of how it's being used:

  • Intercom launched a chatbot called Fin that can better understand what people want, give clear answers, and even hand over to a real person when needed.

  • Morgan Stanley wealth management deploys GPT-4 to organize its vast knowledge base.

As for capabilities:

  • There’s an expanded ability for creativity, superior reasoning, problem-solving, broader general knowledge, association, and output quality. It’s definitely not just memorizing, it’s learning to think and reason.

  • GPT-4 is multimodal. The API accepts images as inputs to generate captions and analyses. Given a photograph, chart, or diagram, GPT-4 can provide a detailed, paragraph-long description of the image and answer questions about its contents.

In the demo, Greg Brockman (President and Co-founder of OpenAI) had GPT-4 create website code from a pencil mockup made in a physical notebook.

Imagine taking a photo of your fridge and getting recipes and meal ideas:

Imagine taking a photo of your living room and getting interior design advice.

Imagine taking a photo of your closet and getting outfit recommendations.

Imagine taking a photo of anything and getting a description, with details, and you can then do anything with it.

What if you took a photo of your product, got a description, and then asked for 10 Instagram Reel scripts, or posts—and you’d have it in seconds?

GPT-4 can even explain why an image is funny, though it doesn’t understand humor:

Does it matter that it doesn’t “understand” humor if it can accurately describe what’s funny—and write jokes?

You don’t need to be good at memes anymore. GPT-4 will be funny for you.

One of the more important updates is the expanded capability of input (and output).

A lawyer can put entire case history, documents, precedents, and more into a prompt and uncover legal arguments.

Your doctor or nutritionist can put everything about your health into a prompt and find new ideas for treatments or food.

You can put an entire avatar or persona brief and ask for literally anything you want—Facebook ads, tweets, Instagram Reels, articles, emails—anything that your avatar would like.

You can have entire email campaigns outlined and written in one or two prompts.

You can have all your content marketing for the next 30 days outlined. And then with a couple more prompts, you can have it written for you.

Long-form sales pages? Done.

Landing pages? Easy peasy.

Analyzing reviews and Voice of Customer research—and turning it into product ideas, headlines, and any other form of copy? Yep.

Are you beginning to see what’s possible yet?

When I asked GPT-4 what it could do, it gave me a list with 20 examples:

I kept asking for 20 more, then 20 more, then 20 more.

It gave me 100 unique, different ways. And I could’ve kept asking.

Please understand this:

The only limit is your imagination and knowing what you need.

So, to wrap up the GPT-4 section, here’s the paper I mentioned earlier.

Please pay close attention to what I’ve marked up in red:

If the image is too small to read, here’s the quote:

We demonstrate that, beyond its mastery of language, GPT-4 can solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting. Moreover, in all of these tasks, GPT-4's performance is strikingly close to human-level performance, and often vastly surpasses prior models such as ChatGPT. Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.

Sure, some people are screaming that this paper was funded in part by Microsoft, which has a vested interest in seeing OpenAI succeed.

So what?

It doesn’t matter because others, not funded by Microsoft, are uncovering the same thing—and coming to the same or similar conclusion.

GPT-4’s performance is strikingly close to human-level.

It can solve novel and difficult tasks without special prompting (see you later, all those flimsy, crappy $20 prompt ebooks).

And it could be viewed as an early (incomplete) version of an Artificial General Intelligence system.

And get this:

This is still early.

We’re on version 4.

Imagine version 10 or 50, or 100.

Where will all this leave you and me?

I will forever see a primary role for humans in (all forms of) marketing and copywriting. And AI tools must remain tools.

This applies to anything we do as humans.

But the question now becomes:

What will happen to all the marketers and copywriters who reject AI?

I think in 6 months, or sooner, they’ll be too far behind.

Then what?

Trust me, marketing and copywriting will never be the same again.

With all that said, let’s look at plugins.

If GPT-4 is revolutionary, then no one is ready for what plugins can do.

CHATGPT PLUGINS

First, here’s the new reality we’re in, only considering GPT-4:

Marketing, along with all knowledge work industries, is forever changed.

In some ways, marketing was already “dead” in 2020 when GPT-3 came out.

It’s just taken a couple of years, and ChatGPT, to make it obvious to a lot more people.

Plugins are changing the conditions and rules of marketing (along with business) again.

This time, it’s wiping the chessboard clean and we’re now playing a different game altogether.

These plugins give ChatGPT access to the Internet and the ability to perform various tasks for you.

The first batch of plugins include those from OpenAI itself, which are a web browser, code interpreter, and code for a knowledge base retrieval plugin.

For marketers (and copywriters, content writers, all the people and all the things), the web browser matters the most.

The web browser plugin lets ChatGPT retrieve information directly from the Internet. Sure, there are Chrome extensions that can do this to some degree now, but not perfectly and not to the same extent or capabilities.

Let’s recap what’s going on with ChatGPT plugins. And then I’ll describe a scenario for you that will make you thrilled and terrified, at the same time.

You can think of it as an iOS or Google app store, where you’ll have plugins for all sorts of tasks available to you with a click.

Some of the first third-party plugins have been created:

  • Shopify: Search for products.

  • Instacart: Order groceries.

  • OpenTable: Restaurant recommendations and booking.

  • Expedia: Plan trips and book flights and accommodations.

  • Wolfram: Access computation, math, and real-time data.

  • Zapier: Interact and connect with the 5,000+ apps available.

In total, there are 11 of them for now:

And creating plugins couldn’t be easier. All you do is use human language descriptions for everything:

For copywriters and writers in general, this is good news:

Your words matter! You could describe the functionality you want—and GPT-4 will make it for you.

At the same time, this will eliminate a lot of mediocre copywriters and writers, too.

How?

Let me paint a few scenarios for you.

As a content writer or copywriter, you can give ChatGPT access to your entire corpus of writing (any writing, from articles to ads, to emails to whatever you can think of).

And then you can interact with it, rewrite it, and have new, unique text written from it.

Imagine giving ChatGPT access to all the sales pages for SaaS companies, or health supplements, tech, or whatever market you’re in.

And then asking questions or giving directions, like “Generate a list of all the headlines for accounting software, organize them in a table according to the kind of headline, and include a description of the type of leads used.”

From there, or with anything, you can have a plugin turn articles or sales pages into social media posts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever) or email sequences, advertorials, landing pages, or Google Ads or…

Do you get it? Do you see it?

A SaaS company might want a version of ChatGPT that can answer customer support questions. And it knows every customer’s support ticket history and all the information in the company’s knowledge base.

And then it passes on questions and answers to the marketing team, who turns it into blog posts, FAQs on sales pages, emails and ads addressing objections, and the list goes on.

Now imagine this:

Today, you need a 10-part email sequence for leads on your email list. The goal of that sequence is to warm them up to purchase whatever product you’re selling.

You log in to ChatGPT.

You click to load a plugin, let’s call it From Zero to 100.

You then instruct it, with a prompt (and replace “URL” with actual URLs):

Go to Amazon and these Shopify stores (find the stores here: URL). Pull every review for Product XYZ (URL). Perform your tasks and then outline and write a lead nurture email sequence that appeals to my Avatar (you can find my profile here: URL).

Seven minutes later, give or take, it’s all done for you.

What the plugin does, under the hood:

  • Scrape, collect and organize all the reviews from the URLs you provided.

  • Analyze all the language for desires, needs, problems, etc. (all the things you need to know as a marketer).

  • Compare it with your provided avatar information, and keep the info that aligns.

  • Matched it with the information about your Product XYZ.

  • And then in a few more steps, turn it into hooks, opening lines, subject lines, body copy—and any copy and email form you can think of.

Done.

Now imagine this for any copywriting or marketing task (SEO, content, ads, sales pages, social media, whatever).

It’s only a matter of time before there are plugins for every and any possible marketing and copywriting task you can think of.

Game over.

Are you at least beginning to see what’s happening?

Imagine any marketing and copywriting task you’re currently doing.

And then understand it can be strung together with prompts and plugins (or even other AI tools).

Do you get it? Do you see it?

You do, don’t you?

Terrifying and thrilling, at the same time.

What happens now?

I’m not sure.

But I do know one thing:

The qualities I’ve encouraged you to develop over the past few years are even more important now than ever before.

They are life-saving and career-changing:

  • Sense of taste, so you can be the tastemaker and lead in your niche.

  • Discernment, so you can make careful distinctions, and spot patterns, in your thinking about truth, real and false.

  • Judgment, so you can make strong, considerate decisions and come to sensible conclusions.

  • Perspective, so you can perceive more clearly and examine everything through multiple views and lenses.

Finally, this leads to:

  • Wisdom, so you know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

It’s your ability to think and act using knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight in a way that’s beneficial to you and others.

You need to become a kind of creative director, editor, copy chief—someone who can pull it together and make the call on what marketing campaigns you’re running and what they’ll say.

And Bionic Marketing is here to help you apply all that, and use AI, for marketing and copywriting.

Strap yourself in.

The next year and this decade will be written about in history books, spoken about around the fire, and legends will be forged.

See you next week,
Sam Woods
Editor