In the last weeks of 2022, the emergence of ChatGPT gained a lot of attention. The reason? Those who have had the opportunity to use it have been surprised by its ability to answer a wide variety of questions with expressions almost as colloquial as if we were chatting with a real person. And it is that ChatGPT is a prototype of an online conversationalist that uses artificial intelligence to offer its results.
Doubts about the implications that it would have in different sectors if its development continues to advance have raised issues that are not minor for more than one. Would human ingenuity and labor come to an end? In the near past we experienced similar scenarios when the Internet appeared and people doubted whether it would be the end of academic productivity due to the ease of «copying and pasting» third-party texts. Although this practice has not disappeared, we have learned to use it responsibly and with the limitations it deserves.
Suspicions also arose when different technologies seemed to completely displace a certain segment of professionals or people dedicated to a trade. This is the case of the emergence of Geographic Information Systems regarding geographers and cartographers. In the long run, the so-called GIS became a powerful tool for space specialists because without judicious people who could get the most out of it, they would be just another underutilized computer program.
However, it seems that with ChatGPT we will witness a deeper crisis. Artificial intelligences (AI) seek to replicate the learning processes of the human mind, albeit on a much more simplified scale. Well developed, they are capable of learning from hundreds or thousands of examples from daily life to apply the most viable solution to specific problems. In some cases, the quality of its results depends more on how much information and data the AI was fed with than on its approach.
In schools the alarms have already gone off and they have ordered their students not to use this product to solve their tasks. There are multiple videos on social networks with people recording the amazing answers that artificial intelligence gives to questions of all kinds. Some experts are quick to point out that this product could shake the business model of Internet search engines as they could be dispensed with if someone or something could be able to answer us without having to choose between a tangle of links.
In Market Research, given its innovative and curious nature, it is not far from this issue. Products similar to ChatGPT could be powerful tools to synthesize what concerns certain topics and automate tasks that now demand many hours of repetitive work for human market analysts. However, it stresses the need to recognize even more experts such as engineers and programmers in more marketing spaces within the development of our discipline than in the past.
At Acertiva we will be very attentive to this new trend that has surely only begun to show signs of being installed in people’s lives. Almost two decades after we began our history in LATAM, we have witnessed other situations that have revolutionized our area: digitization of records, neuromarketing and geomarketing, to name a few examples. Do you think Artificial Intelligence joins this list? Do you need to develop a market study in our region? Write us today.
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