We're now in a human-hybrid limbo, working harder than ever across dozens of communications platforms to keep up with content. Surely the robots should be working harder to help us? Maybe they already are, and we just don't know it.
Last week BuildUp hosted Part 2 of its 2-part series looking at Artificial Intelligence. In Part 1 we spoke to Alys Bryan and Helen Parton about how AI is used for and in the media.
In part 2 Dominique Staindl ran a fireside chat with Jesslyn Guntur, founder of WellWell, and AI expert Ali Parandeh, Head of Engineering - at Applied Data Science Partners, on how AI can free up the comms process so communications professionals can spend more time being human.
We asked a series of questions covering a broad spectrum of AI's impact on communication, from its practical applications to considerations regarding ethics, challenges, and future developments. Here are some key takeaways:
1. You can use AI to help you use AI
Instead of just having one tool to give you similar wording or phrases, it goes so much further where your creative thinking is expanded and your capabilities are widened.
2. It can help build a ‘team’ and affect workflow
For Jesslyn, it’s really important to have this tool to go back and forth with and get feedback on a certain sentence or a certain idea. AI is playing a role in her workflow.
3. You can factor culture into your prompts
For example, you could speak colloquially to the bot, it's smart enough to handle that. A prompt may look like this: “I'm going to ask you to help me write a press release. But before I do, I want you to first ask me as many questions as you may need to better understand my press release”, then the next prompt could be, “You are now the best press release writer on the planet. And you primarily write about architecture for architecture and interior design journalists and bloggers as well as developers and homeowners in and around London”. Then you give it some material. Below is a project description for a recently completed home renovation. “Help me draft a compelling press release that will be highly engaging for this audience”. You could say ‘avoid superlatives’ and apply a company ‘tone of voice’.
4. However, keep the human touch
Whatever they spew out to you is not the final draft. The human behind the prompts plays an extremely important role in taking that first draft into the final round. Don’t use ChatGPT for all your posts without also using your intuition and writing skills, otherwise, it’ll blend into a bland worldwide formula with its tone of voice. The human touch must be still there. There's a tendency to over-rely on AI-driven automation, AI is an enhancement, not a replacement.
5. Have a conversation
Ask some generic questions to see what it says, then learn to push it. See how other people are using it by joining communities around AI and Chat GPT, who share common best practices and new ways of working with the tool. It doesn't matter if you don't get the perfect prompt in to generate what you need. It will come to you with experience.
6. You can buy support
People are building courses and prompt packs, you buy a prompt pack, and it's got 1,000 prompts for marketing. Someone has sat down and created these problems of structuring different tasks in different ways which activity to produce different outputs. And there are also resources called Learn prompting.org that allow you to learn more about how to structure problems.
7. It gives you people power
To start a podcast, you would need someone to transcribe, someone to record, and someone to video edit. But when you start reading you discover some tools to do all of that. The things that used to take five people to do can be done by one. And then you've just opened up a whole new comms channel for your client with all those possibilities.
8. Don’t get trapped by hallucinations
Large language models have a limitation called hallucinations. After giving a prompt, it may give you a list, but it's not necessarily going to be true – it hallucinates the list of sources. Double and triple-check before using the information.
9. Is it going to replace you?
The short answer is no, the long answer is it replaces parts of your workflow that are boring and repetitive. It doesn't replace your job unless all of your job is boring and repetitive. It may, however, update your job description. So instead of you having to rewrite a campaign yourself, perhaps you will end up editing it.
It still cannot hold the context in its head the way humans do. Humans have the context about like, what's happening in the news, like what's going to be coming in the future. What are the trends like, what do my customers like, what do they think they like that they don't know that they like
10. Create richer content
You can have way more data in a 100-minute video compared to a 300-page document filled with words. You can have more and more enriched data in a video, it has audio, and it has 30 frames per second. Future models could be working more with vision data - you can then work with generative vision and generative images and generative videos, and some of these models are coming out to become more efficient and more interesting than static images. Could you be evolving them into cinema, and where's the human element visually, that's probably something a lot of companies need to talk about.
(Transcribed by otter.ai)
Watch the full session below.