Marketers Cannot Lose Authenticity in Their Quest to Embrace AI

Like many other people, I’ve had complaints about the quality of search recently.

Months of overblown hype about Chat GPT and other AI tools have apparently gone to their theoretical heads. The much-heralded recent launch of an AI-powered Bing search has been plagued with some troubling missteps. Such as: Bing insisting that it was still 2022, claiming it spied on its developers using their webcams, and otherwise insulting and gaslighting users. It even tried to persuade a reporter to leave his wife!

The results have been eye-opening, and not for the reasons Microsoft hoped. That sound you hear is executives slowly backing away from their big plans of eliminating workers and resources with an AI bot.

Without getting too deep into a digression, Chat GPT, which many people are referencing as AI, is not really “thinking” or “sentient.” It’s a large language processing model that can understand a voluminous amount of questions and can synthesize terabytes of online information to provide a great answer. But it also gets things wrong often, and it’s also a lightning rod for people trying to get it to say racist, hurtful, or inappropriate things. In short, it’s not ready to replace your experienced and creative human beings.

Marketers should not be worried about their jobs (any more so than usual). Put another way, ChatGPT isn’t going to take everyone’s jobs (yet). Here’s why you should be wary of putting all your marketing eggs in the AI basket:

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It’s too risky to leave up to unproven tech.

No one doubts that AI will have a profound effect on the future of our society. And while there have obviously been some interesting breakthroughs, it is not foolproof right now. It can break down, it can spiral out of control, and it can insult your fans or customers.

There are no quick wins in marketing.

Marketing is about building deep and meaningful relationships with stakeholders: the media, business partners, and public. For all the conversations about AI and Chat GPT, there are undoubtedly many consumers who still don’t fully grasp what they are and would be very upset to learn what they thought was a human conversation was actually with AI. Chatbots, simple in their approach and explicit in their branding, are a world apart from AI-chat that is programmed to mimic a human.

It can’t conjure magic.

Chat GPT’s initial promise is a research assistant, a shortcut to knowledge, and a selector of options. It’s very unlikely to provide you with new, creative ideas.

Chat GPT is more about common sense than it is about replacing your creative visionaries. It won’t think outside of the box and won’t create an iconic campaign or marketing strategy.

You may get sued.

Legal issues are unsettled. AI is initially “trained” by exposing it to existing content. Getty Images is suing AI art generator Stable Diffusion in the US for copyright infringement. What happens if you incorporate unrestrained AI on your site, and it suggests one of your customers does something illegal, immoral, or dangerous? You are likely to be held culpable. Is the cost savings or rush to implement something cool worth this exposure?

You may annoy your customers.

For all the talk about AI, we, as a society, haven’t really come to grips with how we feel about interfacing with computers. There are times when a well- coded chatbot is more helpful than talking to someone on the phone, e.g. when you need a quick answer to a simple problem. But, more often than not, we prefer to talk to humans. And there’s a compelling case to be made that our chatbots should sound less like humans and more like, well, robots to not confuse humans. People are still not sure what to think about AI- created content. It’s not worth the risk for a company to pretend humans created something made by computers instead.

Technology progress is rarely linear.

Chat GPT’s recent stumbles after such a meteoric rise demonstrate that there will be steps back. We’re in a middle period where there will be recalibration and, undoubtedly, other publications and brands getting into hot water by leaping into this technology too early. It’s best to stay patient right now.

Even OpenAI, the organization behind Chat GPT, is seemingly rethinking things. It has released a detector tool to help people determine whether text was written by a human or Chat GPT (which itself is not incredibly accurate).

By all means, experiment with Chat GPT, Stable Diffusion, and other AI technologies to understand what they are, their limitations, and how they might play a role in your marketing efforts. But don’t throw away all your good work and human capital to chase something that is still very far away from being a replacement for good old-fashioned human creativity. It’s very good as a creative prompt. Expect more marketers to use it to bounce ideas off and help with stalling brainstorms. But let others run head-first into using it to chat with customers or produce marketing materials or create copy without humans. You’ll eventually benefit from all the mistakes they make without having to be the one to turn to crisis communications to deal with customer anger and unwanted press.

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