Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
Today is the Ides of March.
It's not a day for celebration; It is a day of caution, as the fortune teller Julius Caesar said.
It didn't work out well for him, but will the 2024 caveat – Beware the Ides of AI – from OpenAI's Sam Altman work for you?
He says future AI will do “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists and creative professionals to do today.”
As a creative and content professional, will you stand on the steps of the proverbial Senate saying, “Et tu, ChatGPT?” and be stabbed in the back by a punctual engineer?
We asked Robert Rose, CMI's chief strategy advisor, for his opinion. Read on or watch this video:
Caveat emptor to marketers
In an article and podcast episode from the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, they discussed the recent report on Sam's bold predictions about the future of AI and creative marketing.
The prediction goes largely unreported in the mainstream media because it comes from a book written in real time called “Our AI Journey” by Adam Brotman and Andy Sack.
(Side note: The book appears to be a clever content marketing move by the authors and an innovative way to combine both a book and an online community and build a revenue-generating audience.)
Sam's prediction can be found in the discussion of AGI – artificial general intelligence. This means that AI is much more advanced than today's generative AI tools and can solve problems on its own and learn to adapt to different contexts.
This understanding puts the prediction into better perspective. Sam was asked what AGI means for consumer brand marketers trying to create advertising campaigns to build their businesses. He replied: “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists and creative professionals to do is done easily, almost instantly and for almost free by AI.”
He continued: “AI will likely test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups to predict and optimize results. Here too, everything is free, instant and almost perfect. Images, videos, campaign ideas? No problem.”
So, should you fold up your tent and go home? It seems you won't be needed much longer. What CEO would reject a system of instant, free, near-free, perfect images, videos, and marketing campaigns that could be instantly and continuously optimized for real and synthetic audiences? Their results would be predictable because they always work; Otherwise the AI would NOT run this campaign.
But before you plan your exit, let’s take a look at the reality of these AI opportunities.
Do an AI reality check
Sam sells a utopian version of AI in an interview for a book called Our AI Journey. It would be a short book and would be self-defeating if he said, “Gee, AI is going to increase our productivity by a few percentage points and make some menial tasks a little easier.” It's hard to raise a trillion dollars in venture capital, what he tries to conjure up magic without a little clickbait.
I don't mind. But what bothers me about quotes like this is the reaction. Markets and people, including practitioners, hear them and two things happen. First of all, it's the headline that matters, not the nuances.
This is where context should come into play. In the interview, Sam says: “AGI is still about five years away – maybe even longer.” Some experts extend this period to 25 years. By the way, there is still no agreement on the definition of AGI.
But this nuance is forgotten when the quote ends up in the news and spreads on social media. The headline will read something like: “Sam Altman says ChatGPT will replace 95% of marketing agencies and creative professionals.”
The second thing that will happen, as with other fear-based quotes about technological innovation, will be to associate this 95% with jobs and people and not with how they change people.
The change is not one-sided. Do you really think that the nature of what creative and marketing people do won't change like everything else? Of course not, but so many people read statistics like that.
Visit the office of the future again
In 1975, Business Week ran a cover article titled “The Office of the Future.” George Pake, head of research at Xerox, predicted a revolution. In 20 years, he said, a TV terminal with a keyboard would allow users to access documents on the screen with the push of a button and access their email or messages from anywhere in the world with another button. He predicted that printing paper would no longer be needed and the days of people filing and typing things would be over. Office costs would fall dramatically.
People were giddy. Word processors would eliminate the need for typing pools, typewriters and filing cabinets, all the things office workers do. Of course, when this started, strange, unpredictable things started to happen.
People paid attention to fonts and layout. The plain walls of text in in-office memos were transformed into beautiful layouts published to the desktop. It made part-time jobs possible. My mother worked from home for a living and prepared quarterly reports between offices because she knew how to use a word processor. In the late 1980s, one of my first jobs out of college was in market research, dictating research reports into a tape recorder. A word processor would insert the content into the technology and design the report as they could create the fonts and graphics that the client liked.
And yet, in 2024, my doctor's office still uses fax machines and filing cabinets. Their shapes still appear as walls of text. Despite the Xerox manager's prediction, the business is not entirely digital.
Gain a new interpretation
You do not know. Sam Altman doesn't know. You don't know how technology will shape your future. You just know that this will most likely be the case.
Let me change Sam's quote. What if I said, “In five years, 95% of creative agencies and marketers will be using some form of AI to do what their clients want.”
Essentially, Sam and I said the same thing. I focused on your development and change, not the technology. When you hear that, your reaction changes, right? My wording feels more realistic to you.
But my quote doesn't make headlines.
That's the conclusion. Every time you see one of these headlines – a prediction – look at it from this perspective: “What if I was the one who changed to reflect the value of the innovation, rather than what the innovation does would to change my value?”
Do you like what you read here? Get a subscription for daily or weekly updates. It's free – and you can change your preferences or unsubscribe at any time.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
