ChatGPT – What’s The State Of Play?

Back in January, we weighed in on ChatGPT and made some predictions of what we expected to see from it in the future. Well, the future is now and we’re looking at everything that’s been going on with the mega-popular chatbot and what its current state looks like.

It’s fair to say that some predictions about the app have been spot on and others have been disproven in the most face-to-palm moments. More specifically, we’re thinking of those who ruled out its ability to outrank human-written content due to the rigidity of its function… and then it happened anyway.

ChatGPT Unexpectedly Hits The Mark

Recently, The Verge published a post about the best printer to buy in 2023 and unashamedly used ChatGPT to write most of it. Although relatively generic, the article covers all the key topics and explains why a specific printer would be the best to buy. 

Well, Google fell for it! The article written primarily by AI outranked a number of other articles to make it above the fold on page one.

This no doubt has left a few SEOs with worries that their position is in danger of being snapped up by a nifty chatbot. Well, there’s no need to worry. Although this article is flying high for the time being, it certainly isn’t best practice, and there’s no guarantee that using AI to write your blogs will rank it on page one.

As Google continues to roll out updates and learn from the kind of content which AI produces, it’ll no doubt be able to sift out and penalise any fully AI-written pieces.

It’s not time to hang up your keyboard yet…

Stumbling Blocks

ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to popularity hasn’t been without its hiccups, from the app struggling to cope with the influx of users, leaving them unable to access any of the features, to Italy’s recent ban of the chatbot. These speedbumps have done little to curb the success of ChatGPT so far, however, it has led to the likes of Elon Musk sniffing around to see what kind of opportunities are available.

Although he initially called for a pause to AI development, Elon has now set his sights on creating a new AI chatbot to rival OpenAI’s flagship creation. The name of his chatbot is yet to be revealed, however, Musk has recently incorporated a company named ‘X.AI’ – a crucial clue, maybe?

Still Free To Use

As we had predicted, ChatGPT does now offer a paid package for customers who want to get the most out of the app. However, what we didn’t expect was that much of the functionality of ChatGPT is still available for free.

Keeping ChatGPT free for the casual user or those who just like to have a play around is a smart move as it allows the app to continue to learn from a much larger pool of users. We suspect that if the app was monetised entirely that we’d see a dramatic decrease in the amount of users and as a result, the AI’s learning curve.

As it stands, ChatGPT Plus is available for $20.

What Next For ChatGPT

We asked ChatGPT how it had evolved since its introduction and here’s what it told us:

As you can see, it’s pretty proud of itself, and if these improvements are anything to go by, you can expect to see a lot more of them. Not only will the app continuously learn and adapt to new requests, but it will also have to contend with rival opposition if Elon stays true to his word.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on where things go from here but we want to know what you think. 

Where will ChatGPT go next?