Elon Musk has often been quoted on his thoughts about artificial intelligence and how it will change the world. Filed neatly under “told you so”, Elon’s pet project – OpenAI has a lofty mission “to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.”
After years of convincing ourselves that creativity and strategic thinking is immune from AI takeover, the products being generated through OpenAI namely ChatGPT and Dall-E, are beginning to expose some cracks in the foundations of that narrative.
ChatGPT, a software application designed to mimic human-like conversation based on user prompts was made available for public testing in November 2022 and its popularity has skyrocketed.
Just this week, Ryan Reynolds has leveraged the tool to generate a clever new ad for Mint Mobile by providing the chat bot with a basic media brief with some simple criteria. The result is quite powerful and should raise some eyebrows in the creative services community.
It’s not just the creative community teams though, media planners have also started to find some utility in the free app. Some are using ChatGPT to develop keyword lists while others are using it to help shape best-in-class strategy by asking for the best-case studies from which to build off.
For text-based advertising like search and native ads, the tool is now being used to create headlines in seconds that are based on the character specifications for each respective environment. While the headlines may not be 100% there, it certainly provides a valuable starting point for copywriters.
When exploring the possibilities of an image-generating engine like DALL-E, it’s easy to imagine advertisers creating instant images of their products with various backgrounds and circumstances that can be deployed and tested as is in-market – or further edited. All of this…currently for free.
But what impact will this have on the digital media landscape? When everyone leverages AI to help their product or service stand out, what will “good” actually look like? We know that today roughly 2% of the content online is original. Creating truly original content is already a challenge for advertisers. When AI engines are utilizing non-original content to determine campaigns and the content consumers will be exposed to, we may end up in a spiral chamber. Good for categories maybe – not so great for individual brands.
Advertisers need to use a measured approach to OpenAI and observe the part of the mission statement that describes outperforming humans at most “economically valuable” work. If we can create from best-in-class starting points, then our work will continue to improve. If we outsource to an echo chamber of sameness, we could create our own black hole.