Monday’s Marketing Minute: Elon Releases The Twitter Files, OpenAI Debuts ChatGPT

Happy First Monday of December, y’all! Hope you are having a wonderful week so far.  I know a lot of you are knee-deep in Holiday planning, as well as budgeting for 2023 at work, and all the personal and professional craziness that comes at the end of the year. Just remember not to overextend yourself, and take some time to relax and enjoy the season.  Here’s a couple of news stories that caught my eye over the last week.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter continues to be a massive story. One of the constant complaints about Twitter for several years now has been questionable content moderation choices made at the company.  Certain stories seemed to be censored, or users expressing a certain opinion or political slant seemed to be suspended at an unusually high rate. Well Elon has promised to share the internal communications around some of these controversial moves, and that started last Saturday with the first release of what Elon is calling The Twitter Files.  The first installment dealt with Twitter’s decision to suppress the story involving Hunter Biden’s laptop.  You can click the tweet below and read the entire thread if you are interested.

Elon has said this will be the first of multiple dumps around particular topics.  He’s suggested that the next installment of The Twitter Files will drop either today or tomorrow, and concern events that happened immediately after the 2020 Presidential election.

Regardless of your take on the politics involved, this story is a huge deal for the entire social media industry. What Elon is doing is taking transparency to a new level, and it will put a ton of pressure on other social media sites to match his efforts to fully disclose how each site tackles content moderation and user privacy. I also believe that Elon’s moves now are positioning Twitter to become the dominant social media platform in the world, within the next 5 years. We’ll see if he can keep the momentum going.

18. Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress the story, removing links and posting warnings that it may be “unsafe.” They even blocked its transmission via direct message, a tool hitherto reserved for extreme cases, e.g. child pornography.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 3, 2022

Artificial Intelligence is a fascinating and evolving area of technology that deserves your attention. To that end, OpenAI just launched a chat bot/tool called ChatGPT.  You can sign up for a free account with OpenAI and test out ChatGPT for yourself, and I would advise you to do so at this link:

Try talking with ChatGPT, our new AI system which is optimized for dialogue. Your feedback will help us improve it. https://t.co/sHDm57g3Kr

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 30, 2022

Some people are calling ChatGPT a ‘Google killer’.  The reason for the excitement is that AI like ChatGPT allows you to have a conversation with an information source, something you cannot do with a search engine. You can ask ChatGPT questions and it will answer in an attempted conversational tone.  Also, ChatGPT has a ‘memory’, so it can build off of your previous questions and adjust answers given as you change the question.

To give you a sense of what it can do, I asked ChatGPT to tell me what I should tell you about Artificial Intelligence:

Now this type of AI brings up some obvious ethical considerations, especially for writers.  With some simple back and forth, I got ChatGPT to write entire blog posts for me, in seconds.  I could get it to write a scene from a book, I just need to give some simple parameters on what information to include, and ChatGPT does the rest to fill in the blanks.  For instance I asked ChatGPT to write the opening scene of a murder mystery involving a tour bus that breaks down in front of a deserted mansion, and within seconds, ChatGPT gave me the scene.  And it was actually really good!

So definitely sign up for a free OpenAI account and play with ChatGPT.  Whether you love it or become bored with it immediately, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with where the technology of AI is headed.

So that’s all for this week, I only included two stories, but I think both stories are important and deserve you spending some time checking into them, so I wanted to stop at two.  Plus I couldn’t find a third story I wanted to include so there’s that.  I hope you have an amazingly productive week!