While it’s never wise to shout “fire” in a crowded theater, it’s also not a good idea to release an erratic Siberian tiger into one either.
Which feels a little bit like the debate politicians, business leaders, philosophers, and anyone else who is trying to determine how AI will change the world have been engaging in.
For some the hype is overblown and they view AI like the slightly noisier cousin of the Millennium Bug and TikTok. For others, we’re hurtling toward an incredibly bleak future – one where ChatGPT is writing quirky songs about your pet hamster on a Tuesday, before trundling on to destroy the entire human race with an army of well-marshaled attack Roombas by Friday.
So what’s a person to do? Hide in a bunker with several gallons of peanut butter and moonshine or frolic in the promise of AI like a kitten in a field of catnip?
If you work in – well – any industry it’s likely you’ve heard plenty about AI already. And when I say “plenty”, I mean various leaders have probably read an article about it in The New York Times and are now running around saying “How can AI help with this?” in meetings.
And indeed, the hype is in overdrive. But is it grounded in reality? And will it truly help transform the world of media and content publishing?
Nobody Really Understands AI…Yet
The first rule of AI is this. Nobody actually knows what they’re talking about, simply because it’s too damn new. And if somebody claims they do know, they’re either lying, delusional, or both.
Cast your minds back to when self-driving cars hurtled into the public consciousness. They were going to destroy the trucking and car insurance industries, while allowing people to binge-watch shows as they were ferried to-and-from the grocery store.
But while the industry has progressed, it’s been much slower than anticipated. Humans do weird, unpredictable things on the roads which even the most well-drilled of algorithms can’t fully account for. Other humans are suspicious about the whole project and have been slow to put in place the necessary legal framework for these things to freely operate.
In short, people being people – i.e. strange, skittish, and mostly unpredictable – has slowed down the self-driving dream.
I suspect the same thing will happen with AI – at least temporarily. And as it develops, it will do so in ways we can’t foresee.
Facebook started life as a platform that promised to connect the entire world in new ways and drive positive, societal change. It’s a great vision, but it devolved into a forum for people to yell at each other about the noise from neighborhood leaf blowers because – well – that’s what people like to do.
Platforms and new tech often seem to regress toward the instincts of human nature, which is why the grand vision for AI will likely not match the eventual reality.
Of course the demos and presentations and spectacular examples given by ChatGPT and others make AI seem magical. And no doubt one day it will be magical. But for anybody who’s used some of the tools that exist today – at least for content creation – they’re clearly not there yet.
AI is Complimentary, Not a Replacement
The right approach is to monitor how AI is developing and think about ways the technology can help to assist – rather than replace – the work your team is doing. I’d also suggest thinking about practical use cases for AI, which isn’t where many people like to start.
I’ve heard discussions in companies around AI that focus on what can be built, vs what should be built (paging chatbots). It’s a classic error in product development thinking.
But AI does have clear potential in automating onerous tasks like content tagging, scanning through and summarizing archived content so that writers can quickly find what they’re looking for, video/audio transcriptions, or combing through and synthesizing giant data sets. It’s not as headline-grabbing as creating a generative image of Keith Richards playing chess in a Bulgarian owl rehabilitation center…but its ability to help brands with customer service, data processing, and beyond will be (and already is) incredibly transformative.
In the digital content space, I like to think that AI will provide an opportunity for brands to stand out from the noise. If everyone starts churning out AI-created content around exactly the same topics, we’ll be flooded with a sea of generic, homogeneous clutter – a starchy filler that offers no real nutritional value or excitement.
This gives brands the opportunity – through the power of perspective, voice, and insider-y authority to rise above the algorithmic sludge.
So while AI will clearly have a more prominent role to play in content creation, it won’t – and honestly can’t – be the only game in town. For content discovery, however, the story will likely be very different.
But that’s the topic of a whole separate post.