Shaking Up Search

ChatGPT has announced it’s working on world domination! Just kidding… or are we?

ChatGPT is renowned for releasing the world’s first successful application of a large-language model. It allows you to converse with AI and get useful (though sometimes hallucinatory) responses!

Since then, they’ve released ChatGPT 4.0, Dall-E, and privatised the company (rather controversially)! However ChatGPT is now reportedly building its own search engine, to compete directly with Bing and Google!

It’s too early to say how these will affect SEO efforts, but we can expect a shake-up if Gemini doesn’t step up to the challenge in time. 

You can check it out here.

Take Note

Have you come across Google’s Notes feature?

With Notes appearing in search results, Discover, and now while browsing, it’s a game-changer for understanding user sentiment, as these notes can offer valuable insights into how people feel about your content, their experience using your website, the effectiveness of ads, and much more.

It’s like getting real, honest opinions from everyday users, which can be incredibly powerful for website owner. 

Plus, Notes can be indexed and rank in search results – providing real feedback with real impact.

That’s provided people use it in the right way, of course – and not just to spam or digitally “vandalise” people’s websites.

We are keen to see how this evolves. 

Unreal Revolution

Yes, yes it’s more AI – but honestly, just about every week there’s a new tool or two that’s changing the marketing landscape as we know it.

Google’s Lumiere and Open AI’s Sora are two brand-new text-to-image and image-to-video tools that are currently in Beta testing mode. But if their video examples are anything to go by, then prepare to have your mind blown. 

Google’s Lumiere is a bit like having a video magician at your disposal. It works differently from traditional methods of making videos; instead of piecing together individual frames, it analyzes text prompts and crafts entire videos in one go.

And, here’s the secret sauce: Lumiere employs an advanced model called Space-Time-U-Net (STUNet) which pretty much gives it a sense of spatial awareness, and uses it to understand where objects are in a video and how they move over time. 

It also ups the ante by generating a super smooth, realistic flow by using a whopping 80 frames, compared to 25 frames served up by Stable video Diffusion. 

And the cherry on top? Lumiere goes beyond basic video creation. It’s a Swiss Army knife of video skills that can fill in missing parts of videos, animate images and add stunning visual styles, such as editing an image or video to make it look like it’s made out of origami or flowers. 

Sora is another powerful new AI system that transforms text prompts into stunning visuals. While it’s not yet available to the public, the sample videos released by OpenAI have sparked a mix of excitement and curiosity. From epic pirate ship battles in a coffee cup to historical scenes from the gold rush era in California, Sora’s creations are nothing short of mesmerising thanks to a unique blend of test and image-generating techniques called a “diffusion transformer model”. 

Similar to Lumiere, it also can animate still images, bringing them to life with precision and careful attention to even the smallest details. Moreover, it can take an existing video and either extend its duration or fill in any missing frames seamlessly.

These videos are so good, they are unbelievably believable…

Scary? Beneficial? The answer is yet to be seen, but we’re pretty excited about the possibilities; one thing for sure is AI is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool. 

Chat Room Boom

Found yourself suddenly in the chat of a Facebook Group you forgot all about and wondered, “how on earth did I get here?” Well, that’s because Broadcast Channels similar to those on Instagram on WhatsApp have started kicking off across Facebook & Messenger from late last year.

If you have access to them, you’ll see them under the Channels tab in messenger. 

They function a bit like giant chats that are restricted to members of a Facebook group. Members get notifications of updates and when the creator drops content. 

Some users are excited about this feature and the unique opportunity it offers for deeper engagement with your favourite creators and brands, while others find it feels a bit like info overload with content duplication and more notifications, as well as a bit of an invasion of privacy.

The chat interface does make it feel more intimate, however, because these chat groups tend to have the same number of members as the group itself (although a much smaller number of people are usually active) the chats can be quite large, which means dealing with numerous notifications from all the messages. Do we really need more distractions from our phones throughout the day? 

Have you joined a Broadcast Channel? Have you created one for your business?

Keen To Dive In?

If you love what we’ve shared above and want to be kept in the loop with our weekly email, The Brief, you can sign up here. We’ll only send you things we love and think you’ll find useful, and you can unsubscribe at any time. And if you need some help exploring any of the above within your own marketing strategy, or you need a rebrand, a custom website built from scratch, Google or social ads, print materials, blog posts – or the whole lot – we’d love to chat. Drop us a line here.