You know ChatGPT, right? The chatbot that you’re broadly suspicious of, but you’ve occasionally used to draft a difficult email, or speed up a repetitive task, like writing alt text for 30 images?
Well, lots of people in the tech community are excited right now because it’s about to release a new version, going from 4 to 5.
The announcement will take place at 6pm UK time tonight, and tech bros are going into hype overdrive. Depending on how well you curate your feed, posts about this may be all you see for the next few days. Alternatively, this might be the first you’ve heard of it.
Either way, let’s dive into what all the fuss is about and what creatives need to know.
What’s the story?
The main thing you need to know is simple: ChatGPT is going to become significantly better. And given how sophisticated ChatGPT has already become in recent months, that’s big.
I’ll offer some personal perspective here: as recently as 2023, I was testing out ChatGPT 3.5 and frankly it was rubbish. Ask it for anything factual and it would spew out information that sounded authoritative, but at least 30 per cent bore no relation to reality whatsoever. Admittedly, it was okay for making suggestions (such as “Give me five ways to improve this brochure copy”). But even then, the results were so broad and generic, it was hardly worth bothering with.
Over the last year or so, though, in my experience, it’s become wildly better. The ability to search the web has been a game-changer for its factual accuracy (although I’d still be wary and double-check everything). And more generally, it just feels like it understands things more clearly, is more thoughtful about generating useful results, and is far less likely to crash or spew out random nonsense or obvious errors.
ChatGPT5 will push things forward even more. That’s because, unlike version 4, it’s been developed with “test-time compute”: essentially giving the AI more power to work through complex problems step by step, rather than rushing to immediate answers.
Early reports suggest ChatGPT-5 excels particularly in areas requiring logical reasoning, mathematical problem-solving and coding. This means it’s not just better at generating human-like text, but at thinking through multi-step processes and maintaining consistency across longer, more complex tasks.
For creatives, this could translate to an AI assistant that’s better for project planning, research and iterative creative processes.
But then again, that poses the question: better for whom?
Friend or ally?
Let’s address the elephant in the room: AI is taking creative jobs, and that’s only going to continue as AI gets better. So, how bad are things going to get?
Well, my view is that some creative tasks will indeed become automated, and certain entry-level positions may evolve or disappear, as they already have been doing. This isn’t unique to AI – technological disruption has reshaped creative industries throughout history,