How the AI Powered ChatGPT Could Transform Pharma Marketing

Artificial Intelligence is back in the mainstream headlines again. The recent launch of the ChatGPT chatbot by OpenAI in November of 2022 quickly gained attention for the advanced nature of the technology underpinning it.

Chatbots have long been a source of pain for customers seeking to solve issues with the products they’ve purchased, but the new technology from OpenAI promises to provide more detailed and human-like responses than any which have gone before it.

"We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests,” says OpenAI in a blog post demonstrating the technology. "ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.”

ChatGPT

While the birth of ChatGPT has caused concern among many for its ability to mimic human behavior – most notably perhaps the fear it might be used to plagiarize essays in the world of academia – the potential for this technology to have wide reaching implications beyond these kinds of interactions is massive.

"The use of AI tools to generate writing that can be passed off as one’s own has been dubbed "AIgiarism” by the American venture capitalist Paul Graham, whose wife, Jessica Livingston, is one of the backers of OpenAI,” reports the Guardian. ""I think the rules against AIgiarism should be roughly similar to those against plagiarism,” Graham said in December. "The problem with plagiarism is not just that you’re taking credit away from someone else but that you’re falsely claiming it for yourself. The latter is still true in AIgiarism. And in fact, the former is also somewhat true with current AI technology.””

ChatGPT has been trained using a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning which both use human trainers to improve the performance of machines. During the supervised learning stage, humans play both sides in a conversation and then, in the reinforcement step, rank the responses the machine is able to generate from them.

The most notable feature of ChatGPT is in its ability to improvise a diverse range of skills. The technology can write and debug computer programs, write music, poetry, and songs, emulate a Linux system, play games, take tests, and so much more.

Pharma Applications

Naturally, these advances in technology have the potential to provide new avenues through which marketers in the pharma space can gather and process data on customers and reach out to them with accurate, targeted, and personalized campaigns – even in the post-cookie world Google is bust building.

Imagine an AI powered program which is able to create custom and personalized content for your customers and then deliver it to them on a regular and scheduled basis. Moreover, this innovative technology could then engage those customers in a real conversation about their pharma needs, without there ever being the need to involve a human agent.

In fact, this might be the best application for ChatGPT technology. Like any nascent technology, ChatGPT has its limitations and not every answer it produces when given complete free reign is accurate or makes sense. ChatGPT also has limited knowledge of events which occurred after 2021 and is unable to provide information on some celebrities. According to the BBC, ChatGPT is not currently allowed to express political opinions or engage in political activism.

However, by restricting its sphere of knowledge to a single topic and providing only reliable repositories of information from which it can draw its conclusions, marketers can exercise control over the flow of data through the technology and ensure it only provides content which is knowledgeable and informative. Of course, as the technology is developed, the need for such human oversight will lessen and the computer can be given more freedom to source information itself.

"We know that many limitations remain as discussed above and we plan to make regular model updates to improve in such areas,” adds OpenAI. "But we also hope that by providing an accessible interface to ChatGPT, we will get valuable user feedback on issues of which we are not already aware. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on problematic model outputs through the UI, as well as on false positives/negatives from the external content filter which is also part of the interface.”

Final Thoughts

ChatGPT’s technology represents a quantum leap forwards and a paradigm shift in AI technology. There are still plenty of kinks to be ironed out, but this technology will certainly be one to watch for pharma marketers looking to leverage AI in their campaigns.

ChatGPT and AI are sure to be part of the conversation at Future Pharma 2023, being held in June at The Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA.

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