Lately, it seems like an hour doesn’t go by without some new AI tool making a huge splash in the news and on social media. After decades of imagining what AI might look like – from hostile robot takeovers to human-AI romances – and slow but steady developments in popular AI use cases (e.g. chatbots, Alexa), 2022 was the year AI finally arrived.
Its come-of-age moment is largely attributed to the initial manifestation of generative AI; namely the introduction of OpenAI, whose GPT-4 natural language processing model forms the foundation for many of the latest AI innovations. Its text-to-image generator DALL·E 2 signaled a seachange in mainstream AI tool adoption, while even more recently, its text generator ChatGPT dominated social media feeds and even wrote a Ryan Reynolds Mint Mobile commercial. Reactions have ranged from impressed to mildly disturbed to indignant. AI’s next big moment arrived with the introduction of Stable Diffusion, launched by Stability AI, and its ability to turn text prompts into stunning visuals, putting the power to visually create at everyone’s fingertips.
While a variety of questions are still being sorted out, the truth about the long-term outlook for generative AI tools, and our relationship with them, lies somewhere between often extremest points-of-view: artificial intelligence is neither panacea nor apocalypse.
AI is a tool. Granted, it’s a powerful one, but any tool is only as useful as its user. ChatGPT, for example, can be a wonderful resource for idea generation – Spark CEO Alan Soucy likens it to a junior researcher – but it’s not a replacement for an experienced marketing or PR professional. That said, AI could signal a replacement for those agencies and in-house teams that don’t make good use of it. As clients look for ways to maximize their PR and marketing budgets, those agencies that can effectively leverage, advise on and indeed, use AI will stand out.
Whatever your take on AI, it’s obvious that it’s not going anywhere. In fact, while generative AI has been grabbing a lot of headlines for its consumer applications, AI and ML are already deeply ingrained across industries and in use by progressive companies, often in ways we aren’t yet aware. From manufacturing to public transportation, from financial tools to healthcare, self-learning algorithms are optimizing the way we live and work, and unlocking new possibilities.
One area around which a knowledgeable professional can provide some guidance is tied to the question of ownership. In short, users don’t own the text that ChatGPT generates. In fact, the publicly available tools, including ChatGPT, own whatever you feed it. So you shouldn’t, for example, enter a prompt containing proprietary information or insights about an upcoming product launch in order to craft a press release: that information would no longer be confidential and could be repurposed by other users.
Usage rights aside, generative AI results can vary widely depending on the prompts it is given. But it takes more than the right prompts to produce something you would want representing your brand. PR and marketing professionals can certainly add text-generating AI to their toolbelts to execute on great deliverables more efficiently. However, creating polished content that reflects your brand still requires human expertise to deliver the finesse and personality - dare I say soul? - that it deserves.
Since the birth of the Internet, Spark has helped usher in such emerging technologies by putting a human face on technology – a strategy that is especially important for AI brands, given how little is understood about the technology, the sometimes justifiable ethical considerations the tech raises, and even the suspicion surrounding it, thanks to decades of science fiction tropes. Obviously, AI doesn’t just mean human-like robots, but educating the public about a field that is sometimes hard to make tangible, is where good PR and marketing come in.
One of our clients, SandboxAQ for example, is delivering transformative solutions leveraging quantum technologies across industries. One of these applications is a heart monitor that uses AI to harness the overwhelming amounts of data that powerful quantum sensors generate. Paired with AI, these quantum sensors can detect minute anomalies that would otherwise go unnoticed. Further applications of AI+quantum tech include modeling molecular reactions to develop new cures and medications.
Our thriving AI practice consists of a variety of consumer and enterprise leaders that are redefining content creation; enabling companies to leverage AI’s colossal benefits to drive significant business outcomes; and driving massive advancements in healthcare, climate and public defense – all to better humankind. That is, after all, the point of innovation. The possibilities are wide open, so if you have a revolutionary AI solution, Spark is here to help tell the world.
You – or your AI assistant – can drop us a line here.
Editor’s note: this article was indeed written by the human-me. But AI-assisted, human-perfected posts are soon to follow. Stay tuned…
