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Pharmaceutical Market Europe • April 2023 • 30

THOUGHT LEADER

Beyond the hype: the future of AI in pharmaceutical marketing

‘ChatGPT and its peers excel in situations where the speed, ease and/or quantity of the output is more important than the quality’

By Brian Norman

They say AI will not replace you, but a person using it will. Think speed and quantity rather than quality. The latter is where humans come into the picture.

In this article, we look beyond the hype and provide informed, balanced predictions on how generative artificial intelligence (AI) – computer programmes that can create new content – such as ChatGPT, will impact our industry over the coming years.

At first, you might be amazed by the range and the complexity of tasks that AI can complete. Outputs are indeed without plagiarism, but they can be identified by AI detectors and by sceptical human reviewers. This shows that AI still has a long way to go.

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Is ChatGPT a groundbreaking tool?

ChatGPT, an AI chatbot, is getting a lot of attention, but it is only one of many AI tools in development. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has done something evolutionary not revolutionary. To gain success, it has simultaneously evolved in a few key areas.

Quantity of training data – ChatGPT was ‘trained’ with copyright-free text from the internet, equivalent to one million books, which is one of the largest training data sets ever used for an AI chatbot.

Quality of training – OpenAI has spent considerable time and money providing additional human feedback, which is helping the AI chatbot to achieve better results.

Context and refinement – The AI chatbot requests feedback from the user in a conversational manner, helping make sure the results are relevant and contextual.

Ease of access – Anyone can easily test and use ChatGPT on a web browser.

So, while ChatGPT is easy to use, it still requires critical thinking from its users. Consider accuracy, impartiality, copyright, safety, ethics and other principles before you use the results. One vital tip can be given: always check the facts on your AI outputs.

How can I make AI work for me?

Now that we’ve established AI as a tool, you can start to think where in your day-to-day work it can deliver value. ChatGPT and its peers excel in situations where the speed, ease and/or quantity of the output is more important than the quality. Perhaps it’s those tasks you wouldn’t even start doing on your own because of time restrictions or the enormity of the task. Could ChatGPT give you something useful to take forward?

Some good examples include using AI to provide inspiration, creating a starting point for your own work or to help you understand complex subjects quickly.

Here are some examples you could try in ChatGPT, go and test them out today: https://chat.openai.com.

Inspiration

  • List suggestions for the name of an educational portal for oncologists using two words that alliterate
  • Write a two-sentence analogy for how ‘disease’ attacks the human body.

Understanding
  • Make this shorter and easier to understand: ‘paragraphs of complex text here’
  • How do I work out if two columns of values have a relationship with each other using Excel?

Gaining Perspective
  • How would patients with ‘disease name’ describe how the condition makes them feel?
  • Write a ‘day in the life’ diary for a patient with severe asthma.

Efficiency
  • Extract the actions from these meeting notes, noting who will do them and when
  • Summarise these notes into the five most important bullet points
  • Write an agenda for a brainstorming meeting about a company conference on ‘drug name here’.

Insights
  • What are the top ten challenges doctors face when diagnosing ‘disease’?
  • Create a SWOT analysis for ‘company/drug’
  • List ten ways the pandemic has opened opportunities for digital in healthcare.

What does the future hold?

The limitations and challenges of ChatGPT help us understand that, although advancing fast, AI is not replacing our jobs any time soon. So why should we care?

Like many other advancements in technology, generative AI is a tool that can make our jobs easier, quicker and possibly more enjoyable. Could it even enable us to reach a higher level of quality and creativity than either humans or AI alone, fulfilling Aristotle’s saying: ‘The whole is greater than the sum of its parts’?

You may think AI is a bad idea and should never be used. Or you can acknowledge its potential as a tool and learn to master it, giving you an advantage over your competitors.

If you would like to learn more about ChatGPT, explore how you could use it in your team or integrate it into your products and services, get in touch at earthware.co.uk.

Brian Norman is Chief Technology Officer at earthware, a Prime Global agency