Loyalty Shop Talk Vol 5 - AI, blessing or a curse?

Back in the day

Picture this, it's 1996 and I'm sitting in a meeting listening to a new technological evolution. One that costs ￡250,000 for an entry level version and many of the household brands that we work for are yet to implement this technology. Guessed what it is yet? A landing page.

Yes, the guys presenting to us are talking about this new advanced technology with the Snake Oil pitch that agencies used to describe the dark art of CMYK 4 colour separation back in the 70's and 80's. A secret language so complex it could have been dreamt up at Hogwarts. Because knowledge is power and power is profit.

These same guys were also the ones now buying up a brand's URL and then fleecing the brand to buy it back off them. It was the 'Wild West' and the landscape was messy.

We're not ready for AI

We're not ready for AI, in the same way that we weren't ready for the Dot Com era. Just because there was a myriad of potential applications for Dot Com's, it didn't mean they were commercially viable. Whilst I'm sure there were many success stories from those early years the only one I remember is Lastminute.com

For now AI is great for creating quick imagery of say an elephant with sunglasses, enjoying an ice cream on a unicycle. Only, look closely, the elephant isn't on a unicycle because the AI tool I used doesn't know what a unicycle is?

You may have guessed by now that this isn't a piece gushing with how fantastic AI is. From what I have researched, we are still in its infancy. The real AI benefits won't materialise for a couple of years in my opinion. But what do I know, I'm no expert.

This is still very much a test and learn stage. A stage where AI seems obsessed with doing things faster and cheaper. You know that saying you can have it 'Fast, Good or Cheap" but you can only pick two?

When it comes to loyalty, the possible impact of AI is the least of your troubles!

If you want to really appreciate AI and the potential changes it can bring to the industry, then you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves and go do some research.

Spending an afternoon generating pictures of elephants on a unicycle eating an ice cream is all good fun - but not very educational.

So as creating music is my passion I decided to explore how AI could help improve my songwriting and production. Relax, there's nothing to hear here, no Spotify release on the horizon.

First learning - there’s a gold rush of platforms that help you generate AI enhanced music, most are basic a few are quite professional. What they all have in common is that you can punch in some lyrics and select a style of music / singer and they will create an entire song for you which is note and pitch perfect in about 30 seconds.

Sure it might take you a few generations to get something you like, up to 50 for me. But eventually you end up with a structure, a sound and arrangement that is close to what you had in your head - and to be honest the result is quite good.

What are the learning’s what are the benefits?

Well, I created an entire album in a weekend - and it sounds great!

But it only sounds great because I used the AI generated track as a guide. I exported the track, used a splitter to individually split out each vocal part and instrument and then imported them into my studio software / DAW and then proceeded to record each part live over each track - which mean’t the end result was AI generated vocals coupled with real life instruments. Think of it as a process which is similar to painting by numbers.

The benefits:

• Speed - without AI this would have taken months.
• Quality - AI vocals are actually pretty good. Delivered in one take, no re-recording or major tuning issues but syncing and timing - not so good when you export the files.
• Creativity - when you generate 50 different versions of a song, you get influenced by a range of arrangements, harmonies and phrasing that you probably never would have thought of on your own. That's a good thing.

So AI in this example is really a training tool, it helps to train you to think wider, think about different arrangement and styles - far more than anything else has ever done. Strangely not one platform is selling these benefits.

What’s the downside of using AI?

Well after you’ve created your third song, you realise that whilst they are good - they all really sound the same.

Also, yes the lyrics might have been yours, but the arrangements and actual music wasn’t created by you. In all honesty, I don’t know where it came from and whether it is essentially passing off someone else’s work or in fact stolen to a certain extent.

The truth is, neither do the sites that sell this service as they have a disclaimer that you should seek your own legal advice when uploading music. Which is weird as their charging model charges you extra if you want to use the output for 'commercial use"

But like all of these AI generated images in this document - whilst they are individually lovely and took seconds to create they all start to look the same.

AI Driven Loyalty

Yes AI is good for improving operational processes and from a technical point of view I'm sure there are plenty of applications that will streamline and make journeys more frictionless which is a good thing. There are far more well qualified loyalty tech guys to educate you on potential applications than me.

But not at the cost of creativity. My one take away from my musical adventure is that creatively AI is both exciting and intoxicating - until you realise that when you use it creatively the output very quickly becomes bland and that's the problem. Good quality vanilla ice cream, is still vanilla ice cream.

As an industry, loyalty is already bland in many ways, similar platforms, similar rewards and a communications plan which if you're lucky allows you to engage customers once a quarter. The last thing it needs is high volume bland communication pieces.

The argument that AI means teams will have more resources to create better more frequent content because it is more efficient may be true. But nothing will get members to unsubscribe or switch off faster than being served up bland content.

Before you get hot under the collar about how AI can drive personalisation - yes it can, and in the future it will be scarily great at it.

But not right now. AI creative and copy is easy to spot, even when you attempt to personalise it. Yes, I've researched AI agents and what they can do - they aren't there yet either, but it won't be long. Right now, AI's sweet spot is operational more than creative.