When it comes to internet search, google is the leading search engine among the top three (with 92% of search market) followed by bing (2.86%) and Yahoo (1.5%). Though Google’s dominance in search market volume is “super-strong”, one question is how much of the Web that Google is covering in its search activities. In other words, how much of the Web that Google has indexed so far to run the search queries pushed to it.
No one knows for sure but many agree it is “Not much”.
As of October 2022, about 50 billion web pages were indexed by Google. Jalluri, writing in www.16best.net says that there are at least 56.5 billion web pages indexed through Google, quoting a report by the WorldWide Web Size Project. What is important is that this coverage is, at best, an estimated 10% of the entire internet. As millions of web pages are added to the web each month (sometimes within a matter of days), and Google indexing is slower than the addition of new web pages, this coverage only shrinks as time goes by.
Still, Google changed the way we used the web. It has entered our day to day lives and even school children around the world are well aware of it. Realizing its power, the global communications industry too adapted google for its work almost immediately, and continues to do so at an unbelievable rate. What is important to note is that Google’s capacity to provide instant information has only helped the industry and it has not been made redundant by Google.
Google has come to define an era of the internet in its own style.
Google’s management has reportedly issued a ‘code red’ on ChatGPT (New York
Times). “Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google has participated in several meetings around Google’s AI strategy and directed numerous groups in the company to refocus their efforts on addressing the threat that ChatGPT poses to its search-engine business.” (NYT)
(In this writing, I refer to Google for purposes of comparison with ChatGPT. Google is mentioned due to it being the dominant search engine (as well as to highlight the functions of a search engine vis-a-vis ChatGPT). Google is not used here to specifically draw attention to it or to showcase its brand vis-a-vis ChatGPT).
The generative ChatGPT is the new go to place that Google has held so far. With its instantaneous, human-like responsiveness it has sent shivers up the spines of many professionals across various industries-rightly so. Its almost instant responses are human-like, contextually fitting queries, demonstrating considerable back office AI coding and development – possibly for a considerable number of years than we are told.
All this could make the PR & communications industry redundant by ChatGPT..or not?
Though ChatGPT appears to pose a challenge to the communications industry, and its features are a threat to many entry level jobs across the world – software developers, copywriters, and so on – there are some use cases that deserve a closer look as they cannot be fulfilled by ChatGPT.
Firstly, the communications industry has evolved greatly beyond mere press releases to different plays: two way social media conversation engagement for clients, targeted multimedia production and messaging and traditional media engagement.
In that, the PR and communications sector is managing an increasingly fragmented communications space in thousands of languages across the world.
ChatGPT’s efficiency is largely dependent on words written on the internet in scripts, mainly the Roman alphabet. BBC reported that ChatGPT as one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models to date, and has 175 billion parameters (accesses 175 Bn words in Roman script).
Clearly these 175 billion parameters do not cover the entirety of the internet (somewhat similar to Google’s indexing rate) and would be a fraction of the overall parameters available.
It would be quite some time before ChatGPT can process natural language responses in other languages.
ChatGPT’s information provision is natural language-like though in comparison to
Google, its advantage is in its speed to deliver such coherent responses in natural
language style. Still, its responses are not vastly different from what a search engine provides except the results are in natural language and structured. ChatGPT’s responses are based on a 175 billion parameter data set (as of 2023 January) and nothing else.
Google too responds to the queries based on its indexing capacity.
The communication industry on the other hand delivers responses that fit the specific situation faced by the client and is far more comprehensive beyond a parameter / data set or indexing rate.
The industry monitors social media conversations rapidly (which change from one minute to the next) and responds immediately – something the ChatGPT is not capable of.
ChatGPT works mostly on text (at present). The industry on the other hand interacts not only with text but with multimedia, integrated messaging, conversations as well as face to face. This is a much larger scope of activities being engaged with, which ChatGPT cannot deliver at present.
ChatGPT’s responses are straightforward / prescriptive and are limited to the specific requests posed by the user’s query. The communications industry responses do not limit in this manner and need to be far more comprehensive, dynamic, sensitive to client-specific. None of which is a capability of ChatGPT whose responses are standard templates while industry responses are highly customized for each clients’ specific circumstances.
It is the industry that can create messaging that embodies the client’s requirement and can spray to the audience though in a targeted way. For instance, the Industry can bring in a specific tone to the message that the client seeks and any other ‘flavors’ that are called for, which is not ChatGPT’s focus. It is this very human creativity that the clients call for and are served by the industry, at highly customized levels.
In fact, the brand’s tone is a very important aspect here. A real and effective brand tone can be maintained by only an actual agency in the industry and not by a virtual AI bot.
The bot could access content that are not related to the Brand or access /create the same content it created for other brands for the brand in question, destroying brand reputation. Also, while an agency creates a unique brand identity and positioning, chat GPT responses spew out the same message for all brands since it accesses the same data set for all brands, thus duplicating the response given already for multiple brands, which is disastrous.
Apart from ChatGPT, there are other AI bots that draw dreamy landscapes in a human-like way and even new bots will emerge in time with audio visual capacities. Still, can they overtake an industry which responds live to constantly evolving scenarios of clients? Can ChatGPT run an entire crisis PR campaign in this fragmented comms landscape while the situation continues to evolve rapidly?
The industry can leverage ChatGPT’s copywriting capabilities for its benefit by using it for the first/second draft of a copy which then could be evaluated and boosted further by the experienced in-house writer.
The industry benefits from chatGPT’s high speed and can cut its lengthy information research time of days to a few minutes or even seconds, thus boosting productivity, multifold. Another critical capacity of ChatGPT is assisting the agency’s planning and problem solving with its high speed outputs, though this is limited by the size of the volume of the data set ChatGPT accesses.
An interesting point on ChatGPT is that it has turned the user and tech market’s focus from pics, videos and metaverse back to simple text conversations (at least for now). It has prompted web users, who have been losing interest in text and increasingly moving towards multimedia, to rediscover the pleasure of textual conversations. In that, informed conversations!
Once ChatGPT gets equipped with strong audio or video response capabilities, it is likely that even Google would be pushed to a back-seat within the web-search market, the reason for its latest Code Red to the employees. Agencies would prefer an instantaneous, researched, conversational result from ChatGPT rather than half a million links from Google that the user has to painstakingly click and open one at a time.
