Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making headlines all over the world, each week with a new advancement or a new perspective on how to make our lives easier. One of the biggest criticism AI has faced is its general inability to replicate ‘the human element.’ Edward Tian, creator of an app that can tell the difference (at the moment) between human generated content and AI generated content calls this "perplexity" and "burstiness".
With any technological advancement, this is a valid concern, especially when faced with the possibility that many functions in society could potentially be replaced by AI. But don’t throw away your career plans because of AI, marketers and content creators!
Let me offer a different perspective
Remember when society thought video games were rotting childrens’ minds and causing them to be violent? Or remember when your Maths teacher said 'you'll never have a calculator with you, so better memorise your times tables'? Or the ongoing debate whether computers would ever replace us?
We DO have calculators in our pockets every day, and more. Video games have become an integral part in children learning critical thinking and cooperation. Computers have become our right hand, rather than taking over the throne itself. As technology has advanced through the years, so humanity has adapted around it and found newer, better ways to integrate new tech into our lives, rather than be replaced by it.
We have integrated computers and the internet into our everyday lives and use them as a tool, instead of fearing them. See our experiment with ChatGPT to understand how efficient and clinical AI can be when asked for content. What we did not see however, is a tool to create personalised, relatable brand content.
AI is only as smart as the humans who created it and made its parameters. No matter how much it learns, it is an unfeeling thing which offers no intuition or empathy, and understandably makes us question its value for producing content. How can you create content fit for your audience if the AI sounds so clinical and bland? Let’s think about what makes something ‘unique.’
What is uniquely human?
The unique, human element can be an artist's unique paintbrush strokes on a canvas, or an artist's song played on your MySpace page, or a developer inserting an inside joke to a video game's questline, or simply the creative process an artist goes through to create a drawing. This is what Edward Tian defined as "perplexity"; that off-the-wall tangent people are capable of going off on while making their point. Or put another way, the ability to draw connections only they see because of their experience.
With AI, the human element can be viewed as the unique and fine-tuned prompts that a human can give to produce more accurate, useful results. Give it a chance, and you might very well generate a piece that DOES have some humour and feeling shining through it. As a very simple example, imagine you’re a stationery brand selling a new line of gift boxes. I can either type in ‘Realistic image of red gift box’ into Canva’s Text-to-Image system and get the following:
Ask it a better question, one that tells a story and is more likely to resonate with potential customers such as ‘Realistic photo of a man gifting woman a red gift box, both are smiling, Christmas tree background’ and you get this:
Obviously, both are super simple images with simple prompts, but the concept of fine-tuning an input is the focus here, and the potential for efficient, large-scale output of relevant content is the goal.
AI can help us - we need to learn how
As various AI tools become better trained, so we will have to adapt and learn to use these tools to their maximum potential. ChatGPT isn’t a simple Google search, and Midjourney isn’t Shutterstock; rather, they are both avenues for personalised, efficient content creation once one learns what prompts to use and how to better ask questions. If we master this, it will allow marketers, social media managers, designers and coders across industries to have time to focus on connecting with their audience better, tell more stories, and achieve better results by focussing on adding what is truly human.
(No, this article is not AI generated! )
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| Author | Christine Newberg |
| Channel | Media |