Is the AI Ready to Take Over?

AI has come of age. They are smart enough to?beat the world’s best players ?at the board game Go; they are creating?award-winning art ?and?solving humanity’s most significant scientific challenges . Surely, they can handle some writing to help you downsize spending, can’t they?

AI is Already Doing Marketing

Marketers are already using AI solutions for various purposes. Generative AI like Dall-E, Midjourney, and OpenGPT are already creating different types of content for marketers to use in their campaigns. They’re not alone in this area.

Wordsmith, Quill, and Jasper.ai are creating unique content like blogs, articles, and opinion pieces. AIs from Netflix, Amazon, and IBM (Watson) curate content for users according to their tastes and preferences. And almost every savvy device user has interacted with at least one of the personal assistances like Google Home, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo, and others. Automated emails, social media personalization, image recognition, chatbots — the applications of AI are varied and many.

In fact,?36% of marketers in a survey ?used generative AIs to power their marketing campaigns. The use of AIs for marketing is not a matter of “if” but of “when” and “how.”

So, the real question is: how much of your marketing can AI tools handle? Where do the reality and human touch start and stop? Some align this to fewer human jobs required in the organization; however, to tackle this question, we must first understand the challenges and potential roadblocks to AI adoption, which requires answering some of the more fundamental questions.

Who Owns the AI Content?

A recent ruling in the U.S. denied granting AI copyrights on the content it generates. The consensus in the legal world is that the human who provides the prompts (keywords, visual instructions, etc.) for the AI to generate content is the rightful owner. The underlying principle is that AI is just a tool that enables users to produce high-quality content. In that sense, it isn’t much different from other tools like smartphones, allowing everyone to take high-quality pictures.

Complexity arises when human interaction is minimized or eliminated. Currently, there are no standards or clear lines between AI-generated content that can be “protected” and cannot be. That leaves plenty of room for free plagiarism or outright duplication, a threat that marketers seem to have largely ignored. Some countries recognize copyright for computer-generated works, so there will be a complex response and reaction across international audiences and leaders regarding how, where, and why anything generated with AI might be protected.

Can Brands Rely on AI?

What most AI users don’t know and AI creators don’t advertise is that every AI is a black box. Nobody — not even their creators — knows what goes inside the AI. AI teams feed high-quality data to train AIs to perform “similar” tasks. However, when the AI performs a task, there’s no way to tell what logic or thought process went behind that execution. Unlike humans, AIs are not adept or accurate at describing their logic. There are more reasons why AIs are inherently unreliable:

·?AI Lacks Authority

AI solutions like ChatGPT are good at answering almost any question marketers, or their audiences throw. However, they must supplement their answers with citations, notes, footnotes, or references. So, there’s no way to know how reliable their answers are.

·AI Can Harbor Bias

The current generation of AI is trained by feeding them vast quantities of human-generated data. As such, they carry the same biases that exist in human-generated content. The?gender and racial biases of AIs ?have been well-documented and studied. In the legal space, these biases can potentially endanger an entire community or, worse, a whole spectrum of minorities. In an increasingly polarized world, AI manifestation of these biases can be catastrophic for brands. It will likely become illegal for decisions in regulated industries such as finance, real estate, medicine, etc.

·?AI Can Be Easily Manipulated

AI solutions are perpetually learning. They learn even when interacting with humans. New information is processed, stored, and used to improve future responses and actions. So, any human interacting with an AI can feed it inaccurate or deliberately misleading information for nefarious purposes or merely “trolling.”?Microsoft’s Nazi-loving teen bot ?was the perfect social experiment that demonstrated this flaw.

Can AI Produce Human-quality Work?

The growing incidences of AIs outperforming humans at some specific tasks, such as Chess, art competitions, and even?medical diagnosis , can lead one to conclude that AIs are better than humans. However, the truth is that AI solutions offer accuracy in only a narrow set of applications, and they, too, in a limited context.

For instance, content writing AIs use keywords or prompts to research and digest information available on the internet to “reproduce” engaging content. At best, AI text content is mediocre. Its content lacks originality, nuance, complexity, narrative, and emotion. In the worst-case scenario, it’s just a mishmash of content borrowed from top SERPs in search engines. Text AIs are decent recyclers; they are far from creators.

That said,?AI is doing a pretty good job ?for content that does not require higher cognitive capabilities. Mostly, AIs require human “supervisors” to ensure that the quality of work they produce is up to the standards required by the brands. So, AI could assist marketers in creating acceptable-quality content and do away with writers, designers and other talents for most tasks unless originality is critical for the job. This throws up the ethical question, as well as the technical one — will the platforms behind our publishing and ads penalize us for using this? How? When?

Is It Okay for our teams to Use AI?

With?fears of recession looming ?and threatening the livelihood of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, the global workforce is already anxious for their future. The proliferation of AIs and their increasing adoption are only fueling the fires of uncertainty. Even religious leaders are joining the calls for the ethical use of AIs for the greater good.

To their credit, some tech giants have expressed commitment to ethical AI development, such as?Microsoft’s Responsible AI Standard . However, it’s hard to predict whether other AI developers will adopt similar standards or whether these tech giants will not buckle under competitive pressures from other AI creators who may not care too much about the impact of their AIs on the job market.

Predictions for AI across the Industries

Emerging AIs are already threatening the dominance of legacy leaders. For instance, the?Google Search business is facing an existential threat ?from ChatGPT, which is increasingly accurate and relevant in its answers to users. After all, Google Search’s primary purpose is to provide accurate and relevant answers to user queries. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft invested in OpenAI, the creator of GhatGPT, and many are guessing where this might be integrated across the suite of software and services they provide. Fortunately, Google has an advantage: Deepmind’s Sparrow, a chatbot that has the potential to rival ChatGPT.

Whether Google integrates Sparrow into its Search business, launches it as a new solution, or fails to utilize its potential (an unlikely scenario) entirely, there’s no doubt that digital marketing is headed for a paradigm shift. Without strong legislation to prevent the misuse of AI, these solutions will become the norm rather than the exception in the marketing domain. They are inexpensive, almost always available, highly scalable, and do not come with personality challenges. However, the customization required to align with your industry, regulations, region, localized language, and brand voice/customer profiles — — requires human effort and experience.

What human insight, information and specialization do you bring to the picture, product, production, or overall organization? AI adoption in marketing, decision-making and new business creation will only increase. Continue learning and building your education with that in mind — as there are already?degree programs focusing on AI . Keep the creativity!

— Christina shares candid insights and ideas based on her work, network and passion for mobile, payments and commerce. She focuses on the latest innovations from products and growth to people during the day while teaching students and mentoring entrepreneurs at night. Connect with her on?LinkedIn ?or?Twitter . All views are my own. —