The Future of AI and Digital Marketing

Are the robots coming for our jobs? Artificial intelligence is nothing new, but new innovations are pushing AI to the forefront of digital marketing. Businesses will need to adapt to how new machine-learning tools are changing how we do online promotions. Welcome to the future of marketing.

Why are people so excited about AI?

• It makes hard tasks quick and easy.
• There are some amazing use cases, for example: “write 500 words about the Civil War at a second grade reading level in the style of The Rock.”
• It’s fun!

How does AI impact marketing?

• It can generate content for you, both text and images (and video before long).
• It’s great for helping generate content marketing ideas.
• It’s also able to write blog posts, social media posts, emails, and more.
• AI can also create better, and more specific stock photography.
• All of the content is original and essentially instantaneous.

What are some of the AI tools people should try?

• ChatGPT for text
• DALL-E for images
• I’m signed up for the Bing beta, but don’t have it yet.

What are AI’s strengths? What are the limitations?

• It can consume and refine incredible amounts of data in seconds.
• AI is surprisingly adept at following prompts. But it can’t create prompts for itself.
• It’s not really “artificial intelligence.” At a high level, it’s just predicting the next word, but it feels like more than that.
• Not all AI tools have access to the entire database of the internet. While others have arguably too much data.

Should we be scared of or worried about AI?

• Not scared, but you don’t necessarily need to like it. As writers, we both have our concerns with it. 
• Human-written text is already becoming flooded with AI-generated text. We don’t have to like it, but it’s coming.
• It’s hard to know where it’ll take us in the next decade, but it seems likely that very soon you’ll be able to say something ridiculous like “make a 10-minute show where Tom Hanks, dressed as a firefighter, fights Jennifer Lopez for control of the moon” and it’ll generate it instantly; including text, dialog, speech, and even video.