Generative AI and the Future of Marketing

Recently, our guest speaker for the Digital Media Marketing Seminar was David Rice, professor of marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University and the executive director of the Future of Marketing Institute (FMI).

He started his presentation with an explanation what is the Future of Marketing Institute: it is the premier global forum on teaching, research, and outreach on the future of marketing topics. FMI is the first-ever university course on the future of marketing. It will aloud students to learn emerging digital technologies and practice to research, create, implement, and evaluate innovative marketing plans using them. He highlighted that the future of marketing will increase personalization, and to increase personalization, marketers must use advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). He points out that Digital Marketing Tools and AI will become more sophisticated in the near future, and that is why marketing students must learn those new skills to keep up with the fast-evolving environment in the marketing field.

Professor talked about Generative AI – Artificial Intelligence that can create new content, including text, images or music. He explained that ChatGPT is a software that is also called a “Large Language Model” (LLM). It trained on billions of pieces of data scraped from the Internet. ChatGPT uses text (a “prompt”) as the input and generates new (original) text as the output. In his opinion, ChatGPT is dumb, and can’t be trust it 100% because it can “hallucinate” and make things up. As an example, he shows incorrect information about himself created by ChatGPT. “That is very important to always check facts and references when using ChatGPT for assignments and real-world projects,” says the professor.

He points out other limitations of Generative AI, such as lacking of currency of knowledge, ethical concerns and bias, and inability to hold long or old conversations. Another problem with AI is copyright. Current law is way behind the speed of technological change and provides little guidance and no consensus with regard to Generative AI content. He mentioned that the major software systems text-to-image right now are DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. They are producing “new” images by using original images from the Internet. Do we have to pay royalties to the authors of the original work? This question doesn’t have the answer right now. Professor shared his take on the work of the famous fashion designer Oscar de la Renta “Floral Dress” with the help of AI. The result was impressive. He shared some other examples of work that use the ChatGPT text-to-image model, like the Coca-Cola bottle image and other images, all of which were spectacular.

Professor said that the influence of generative AI on marketing today is extensive. Technology is disrupting almost all aspects of the industry. Before ChatGPT, everything (articles, podcasts, posts and tweets) was done “by hand.” Now ChatGPT is doing the work. In the future, Generative AI will make a big impact on Advertising and Video Production; any company will be able to use Generative AI to make a professional video for their business. It will give a chance to every marketer, large or small, to become a true storyteller and creator. The Runway ML (Text-to-Video) platform for artists to use machine learning tools in intuitive ways without any coding experience for media ranging from video, audio, to text will give users the opportunity to create and publish pre-trained machine learning models for applications such as generating photorealistic images or image captions.

Generative AI made an impact on Search too. For many years Google was the default method to search for information. Now Generative AI is revolutionizing the Search. In the near future, advertisers maybe even be able to pay to insert answers into Generative AI answers.

ChatGPT is expanding too. It just released plugins for OpenTable and Expedia with real-time Internet connections, which adds additional functionality to it. The AI Agents plugin is a third-party application that allows the GPT language model to interact with multiple AI agents through external APIs and enables ChatGPT itself to determine a plan to achieve a goal. The main task of an AI-based agent is to perceive the relevant information and data from its environment and act upon it accordingly. AI Agent lets you input an objective, and the system runs automatically. It is no need to input a prompt. For example, you can ask to book a "Dinner Out". Ai Agent will find the best restaurant by comparing information on many websites; Plugin will book a reservation on OpenTable or call the restaurant. One more tool that is worth our attention is Google Duplex, a new technology for conducting natural conversations to carry out “real world” tasks over the phone. It will help save time for businesses and individuals in the near future.

This presentation was very insightful and made a great impact on me. I learned a lot of new, interesting and important information about new technologies and their use in digital marketing. I found out that ChatGPT is not reliable, and further research is needed to present true and up-to-date information. Some ethical concerns and biases also raise questions. The unresolved problem with copyright is differently needed attention. It is a very blurry line between “original” work and so-called “new” creations. The positive aspect of this technology is making workflow easier and faster. For example, with traditional communication methods, customers may have to wait for hours or even days to receive a response to their queries. With ChatGPT, customers can receive instant responses. By using AI-powered analytics, marketers can quickly identify trends, track ROI, and optimize their campaigns for better results. It is great that every marketer will get a chance to create professional-looking videos and become a true storyteller and creator. First time I learned about the Future of Marketing Institute, and this information is important.

This presentation definitely will impact my career path. I want to learn more about those new technologies to keep up with new trends and follow the progress. These technologies will become better with time and will be more reliable and helpful. That is why I want to apply them to my work to be more productive and officiant. In my personal opinion, in the creative area of work, you better use your own ideas and imagination because your creative spark can’t be replaced by any technology. It is original; it is genuine; it's your true creation! What do you think? Are you agree with me on this?!?