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TWW Deep Dive 003
Friday 28th October
👋 Hello! Welcome to the 3 new subscribers this week, you’re in good company👋 Something a bit different today, as I dive into all things AI. Get ready to have your mind blown by what’s possible with generative technologies!
📚Notable news this week📚
🤖The rapid rise of AI 🤖
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the past couple of months, you would have heard of AI taking off like a rocket ship with all sorts of interesting applications being discovered. Here are just a few headlines you may or may not have seen…
In fact, if you read the Widget last week (TWW 074) then you witnessed some magical and wonderful AI, as - hold on to your hats -AI wrote the WHOLE THING for me.
Now, you must be asking yourself how on earth did it capture my wit, cynicism, and rational optimism©. Well, the process is pretty simple. I signed up to Jasper.ai for a five-day trial (I don’t have the $500+ a year for membership), fed the AI some of my previous Widgets, and performed a tone analysis. The tone came back as ‘cynical & sarcastic’, which as a Brit is brand new news to me… From here, I went into my trove of stories and links that I’d scoured for the past week, took the headline, and asked the tone to be cynical, sarcastic, and boom! It created the Widget, story by story.
The Widget typically takes me 2/3 hours to write. This edition? 45 minutes.
Some caveats to call out here. It required human curation and I went in to add cultural relevance from the week, but it did a pretty tidy job.
WE GET IT, YOU’RE LAZY. What is it?!
So far this year we’ve witnessed the proliferation of Generative AI, with text-to-image and text-to-video systems starting to disrupt the status quo of production and creativity. The three systems getting the most attention here are DALL-E, Mid journey, and GPT-3. With simple text inputs, users can instantly build detailed videos, rewrite articles (or homework), and beautiful imagery –which as mentioned above is winning art competitions. In fact, it’s at such a “high standard that humans have a hard time telling the difference between synthetic & non-synthetic putouts”1
For example, the above creation is from DALL-E. Where I put in the following text input: ‘the metaverse by salvador dali’.2
The advent of the internet saw distribution costs lower, with advertisers, brands, and publishers able to deploy content with minimal to 0 costs. The acceleration of Generative Adversarial technologies could see the creation of content move to 0 in years to come which would have a huge impact on the creative industry – instead of software that mimics a paintbrush, ‘we now have software that mimics the painter’. 3
But why does this matter? Well, my friends, 99% of those who subscribe to the Widget are in the Media, Marketing, Tech, or Creative industry. We are knowledge workers, we are paid to create - whether that’s a strategy, a media plan, or a creative idea- we are given a stimulus to absorb and spit out a valuable idea/creation. With generative AI, these tools can create ideas faster with A LOT more stimuli. Currently, we use software to work for us, but in the next 10 years, we can expect it to collaborate with us.4 There will be new jobs (such as AI prompters) and in fact, it will produce a HECK load of efficiencies.
For example, we’ve all had to run reports before for clients, or internal stakeholders. What’s your biggest bugbear with it, Insights?! Correct. What if you feed AI performance data, trends & key results and it wrote your report & produced insights?
YEP, it’s a bloody exciting time in the field of AI & machine learning. There is exponential growth in the field of artificial intelligence, with a doubling rate of 24 months for new AI and ML papers on certain academic sites, potentially hinting that we’re at an inflection point. BUT, a big capitalised but here. If you’ve gone in to play with these tools you’ll notice that the imagery is 9/10 pretty average (it’s fed by stock imagery sites after all), it can’t interpret language too well alongside image input and the advertising copy is pretty unimaginative. It’s amazing technology at the beginning of what’s possible, so let’s not get carried away yet but get excited for sure!
Input: ‘advert for avocados, wearing hats’