Of course it would have been great if we could get our new team member Jasper AI to actually do what we ultimately want: to write better articles than we are able to ourselves.  Imagine that what recently cost hundreds of euros per article would now, in principle, write itself into world history by searching worldwide for the perfect research that would lead to articles we could only dream of. To be better than Harvard Business Review and world-class scientific magazines. We’ve gone all in, Now we would add at least one more employee to the team, costing per year what regular living journalists charge for one or maybe two articles, with the editorial office bursting into cheers.

ChatGPT, perhaps the most famous thing in the world right now, is a so-called chatbot or virtual assistant, based on a large language model developed by the company Open AI under the leadership of its CTO Mira Murati and others. The ChatGPT client can serve up facts in response to questions, compose usable texts within various genres, and converse in a human-like manner in many languages. And there are other similar assistants, such as Closers Copy, Copysmith, Copy.ai, Writesonic, Rytr, Anyword, Peppertype.ai, and Frase.io, to name but a few, in a quickly growing market segment. When I query Google about these types of bots, I get 758,000,000 hits in 0.29 seconds. And surely that will double in the next year, if not quadruple?

At first I thought: Wow! Now we’re finally here. Just ask the bot for the best article and it will appear on my screen within 15 minutes or so. Well, as it turned out, it didn’t even take 15 minutes, but unfortunately, everything I’ve asked for has turned out to be thoroughly unimpressive and incredibly boring to read. There’s an embarrassing repetitiveness in the texts and even rubbish about non-existing sources included. The language is rigid, and the biggest problem of all is that it’s writing is simply severely lacking in soul. And after all I suppose that is in fact exactly what still separates us from the machines, at least this far. 

The technology will evolve, of course. And obviously there are already advantages, like for instance translating short texts for different social channels, but who really needs 50-language social posts? I suppose some multinational companies have those specific needs, but we believe Meetings International is what it is because we use our own brains to help us decide what to write and choose whom to interview, from people in our network, or from our network’s various networks.

We will likely soon see magazines made entirely with these new AI chatbot tools, if they’re not already here, but I prefer reading the opinions of real live people that I know are knowledgeable and curious about where the whole meetings and events industry is heading. We want to meet researchers working on the future issues of the business events industry, and we want to keep helping researchers from Sweden, Australia, South Korea, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, and other countries, to connect.

This far, I haven’t found any bot that can help with those type of tasks. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before we get there, but until we do you can rest asssured that there won’t be any bot-generated texts in Meetings International. We are driven by desire and emotion, and only our imagination sets the limits for what we can achieve. Can bots even have fantasies? We’re not convinced, but we’ll keep trying to teach Jasper how to educate himself enough for the investment to actually pay off at some point. But we’re certainly not there yet.