Generative AI has the potential to be a powerful tool in the marketing world.

Despite the controversy, generative AI has the potential to be a powerful tool in the marketing world.

Key topics:

• Ethical questions. Generative AI raises legal and ethical questions about copyright infringement and intellectual property rights.
• Immense potential. Generative AI offers significant time and cost savings, customisation, and increased productivity and revenue in growth marketing.
• Boosting ROI. Marketers can use generative AI to automate mundane tasks, gain data insights, and create engaging content that resonates with consumers, reaching more people and boosting ROI.

If you're reading this article, you probably know what generative AI is. Generative AI has stirred up controversy due to its potential to create digital images, written content, and videos from a few written instructions (like ChatGPT, for example).

Generative AI technology is revolutionising growth marketing strategies by creating high-quality visuals with fewer resources (including fewer marketing employees).

On the flip side, generative AI also raises ethical questions about copyright infringement and intellectual property rights.

But despite the controversy, generative AI is a powerful tool in the marketing world - one that will undoubtedly bring great rewards if handled ethically.

What Stakeholders Should Know About Generative AI

Before adopting generative AI, stakeholders must consider the legal implications regarding what rights they have over AI-generated content. That is the most unprecedented grey area in this whole debate, and society will eventually need to establish guidelines.

Privacy is also a concern in any conversation about new technology, and the generative AI conversation is no exception. Some argue that its use should be limited only to public data sets rather than scraping the Internet for all content where the copyright licence is not permissive.

There are no clear answers to these types of questions at the moment. Trying out anything new is always a gamble, especially regarding emerging technologies. For now, that's a cost-benefit trade-off stakeholders must weigh for themselves.

Even so, generative AI is a powerful tool that will undoubtedly bring great rewards when used responsibly. All the above considerations are legal and will be worked out shortly. In other words, they aren't obstacles that will ultimately slow down our AI progress.

Benefits for Growth Marketing

Generative AI has immense potential in growth marketing. This technology offers marketers significant time and cost savings, which we've never seen before.

Moreover, generative AI's advanced algorithms allow marketers to create unique visuals tailored to their target audiences. This level of customisation is not possible with the manual creation of images or videos, ensuring that generative AI revolutionises how businesses produce visuals while reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Ultimately, it's a powerhouse of increased productivity and revenue.

The Real Issue with Generative AI

Generative AI allows marketers to create high-quality visuals with fewer resources, leading to massive rewards for businesses that adopt the technology. Unfortunately, some of those "fewer resources" will inevitably include human headcount. This is a real fear this tech creates, especially for marketers, photographers, videographers, and copywriters.

As we're starting to see, it now can. It's a tough pill to swallow, but something marketers everywhere are going to have to come to terms with and adapt to accordingly.

History is never kind to those who fight progress — and, like it or not, generative AI is real progress and a permanent change to how creative assets will be made in future.

Leveraging the Advantages of AI

It's not all doom and gloom, however. There are several ways you, as a creative, can leverage AI to your advantage.

For example, use generative AI to automate mundane tasks such as generating blog posts or creating product descriptions. This leaves more time for you to focus on bigger-picture aspects of your marketing strategy, such as crafting better campaigns or improving customer relationships. Generative AI can also help marketers create more engaging content that resonates with consumers, allowing you to reach more people and boost ROI.

And remember that generative AI allows marketers to access data and insights that would otherwise be difficult or time-consuming to acquire independently. With AI tracking user behaviour, marketers can better understand what works and what doesn't when it comes to targeting. Use this data to refine existing campaigns or create more effective ones for specific target audiences.

Embrace Generative AI for Growth Opportunities

Generative AI will take you further in your career if you embrace it as an opportunity for growth and creativity. By understanding the potential of this technology, you will be able to reap the benefits and take your business strategies further than ever before.

The truth is nothing is going to stop this train. So as generative AI continues to evolve, stakeholders must take the necessary steps to ensure generative AI is used responsibly. Until the legal ramifications begin to take shape, it's our responsibility to make sure we're using it for the greater good.

From Marketing to Design, Brands Adopt AI Tools Despite Risk

Even if you have yet to try artificial intelligence tools that can write essays and poems or conjure new images on command, chances are the companies that make your household products are already starting to do so.

Mattel has put the AI image generator DALL-E to work by having it develop ideas for new Hot Wheels toy cars. Used vehicle seller CarMax is summarising thousands of customer reviews with the same "generative" AI technology that powers the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, Snapchat is bringing a chatbot to its messaging service. And the grocery delivery company Instacart is integrating ChatGPT to answer customers' food questions.

Coca-Cola plans to use generative AI to help create new marketing content. And while the company still needs to detail exactly how it plans to deploy the technology, the move reflects the growing pressure on businesses to harness tools that many of their employees and consumers are already trying.

"We must embrace the risks," said Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey in a recent video announcing a partnership with startup OpenAI — maker of both DALL-E and ChatGPT — through an alliance led by the consulting firm Bain. "We need to embrace those risks intelligently, experiment, build on those experiments, drive scale, but not taking those risks is a hopeless point of view to start from."

Some AI experts warn that businesses should carefully consider potential harms to customers, society and their reputations before embracing ChatGPT and similar products in the workplace.

“Think deeply before using this tech,” says Claire Leibowicz of The Partnership on AI. It's a non-profit backed by big tech. They've released recommendations for AI-generated media. “Play with it, but ask what purpose it serves.”

Mattel's been using AI for a while. OpenAI's image generator helps them create new toys. But ChatGPT's release in November sparked interest in generative AI tools.

“ChatGPT shows their power,” says Microsoft executive Eric Boyd. “It's changed how people see it. My kids and parents use it.”

Caution is needed. Text generators like ChatGPT and Bing chatbot make writing easier. But they can spread misinformation. Image generators raise copyright concerns.

“For creative companies, copyright protection for AI output is an open question,” says attorney Anna Gressel. She advises businesses on AI use.

A safer approach is using AI as a brainstorming partner. It creates mock-ups, but humans make the final product. This keeps people in the loop.

Forrester analyst Rowan Curran says AI tools should speed up office tasks, like word processors or spell checkers, not replace workers. “It's part of the workflow,” he says.

Consumer-facing chatbots need guardrails. They can respond to users' questions unexpectedly.

Public awareness fuels competition between Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. They sell cloud services and have the power to train and operate AI models. Microsoft invests billions in OpenAI, though it also competes with the startup.

Google has been cautious about introducing generative AI. Now it's catching up with the upcoming Bard chatbot. Meta builds similar tech but doesn't sell it to businesses like its peers.

Amazon is more muted but partners with startups like Hugging Face, maker of a ChatGPT rival called Bloom.

Hugging Face's co-founder Clement Delangue says transparency is crucial. Their platform lets developers share open-source AI models. It helps regulators understand and control the tech. It also lets underrepresented people know how the models have been trained and where biases lie.