Adopt AI or be left behind?

For years Artificial Intelligence (AI) has had a prominent place in our everyday lives, but for many people its prevalence and impact remains largely unnoticed or underestimated. Artificial intelligence features in our smart devices, determines the ads we see on social media, it tracks and predicts our behaviour across many of the applications we use daily.

Yet the new wave of generative AI, sparked by the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, has been met with mixed responses – spanning from curiosity to fear.

By January 2023 Chat GPT had reached 100 million monthly users – an adoption rate which surpassed even giants like TikTok and Instagram. It has been called the most important technological breakthrough since social media.

The impact of generative AI

Many the fears surrounding generative AI focus on the power and capabilities it possesses. Concerns centre around the speed of its development, profit taking precedence over safety and the impact on jobs. While other more catastrophic narratives focus on the sheer power of AI and its ability to self-improve, with some even suggesting it could eventually wipe out humanity.

Perhaps more timely and pragmatic concerns should focus on how the growing reliance on AI could make already huge tech companies more powerful in the global economy, the impact on the labour market, and the blurred lines between truth, fiction and miscommunication in online content. We can speculate all we like, but what we do know is that pandora’s box has been opened and there is no going back, it is how we move forward and adapt that will set the trajectory. This week Open AI CEO Sam Altman testified before Congress about the risks involved with AI.

But what about the average person?

Until now AI has been an assistant of sorts, what generative AI brings is the ability to create – at this moment AI programmes are drafting blog posts, writing strategies, preparing business plans, debugging code, sketching blueprints and creating lifelike photos. AI is creating in ways only humans could before and it is this power to disrupt and change the way we work which adds the scare factor for many of us.

But the key question is this…if we don’t adopt AI, will we be left behind?

You can take some comfort in the fact that the release of ChatGPT came as a shock to even those in the lofty offices of Silicon Valley. Companies like Microsoft and Google were taken off guard by ChatGPT’s launch, with Google even declaring a ‘code red’ corporate emergency response. The following months we witnessed a flood of new generative AI tools, many of which are built upon ChatGPT, others such as Google’s Bard are separate tools but the general idea remains the same.

What does this mean for normal people in everyday life and, in particular, those running businesses? Well, if you are willing to explore there are a range of publicly available generative AI tools to make use of. Tools which can be used to automate repetitive tasks, generate content for social media and marketing campaigns, create personalised customer experiences, and more.

As the AI race continues we will also see generative AI tools being incorporated into existing products and services, here are just a few examples:

·???????Buffer – The social media management tool has recently launched an AI Assistant which you can use to generate ideas in just a click and repurpose existing content.

·???????Canva - The graphic design platform has been investing heavily in AI, it recently introduced AI to generate images from text descriptions, so you can create custom images without having to use any design skills, as well as ‘magic write’ a tool which uses AI to generate text content for your designs, such as headlines, descriptions, and captions.

·???????Shopify – the ecommerce platform introduced AI-generated product descriptions powered by Shopify Magic, creating high-quality, compelling product descriptions in seconds.

·???????Adobe – Adobe is introducing Firefly, a new family of creative generative AI tools will bring bring text-to-image generation to Photoshop and give the ability to apply styles to text in Illustrator, among other features.

As companies strive to keep up we will likely to see many more AI integrations into the products and services we already use. This means that even if you are not ahead of the AI curve it is likely that AI will be unavoidably dangled in front of you at various opportunities over the next few months and years – it will become largely inescapable. With their numerous benefits, AI tools will likely become indispensable features in our work and daily routines.

For businesses there are opportunities to embrace generative AI and integrate it into products and services. We are right at the beginning of the curve, it is all to play for and now is the time to get involved.

As an agency we are experimenting generative AI and using it in production with a number of our clients. While we maintain a hands-on human led approach to our creative content and strategy, we are experimenting with AI based prediction tools for our CRM product, AI generated product recommendations, AI ‘expert’ chatbots trained on source material where failure to produce correct answers is not acceptable and more.

Get in touch with us today if you are interested in incorporating AI into your product or business, we’d love to have a conversation.

View our profile here: Moonlight | Digital Agency

#artificialintelligence #ai #ChatGPT #GoogleBard #generativeai #openai