What I Know, 2 Months In

About Marketing and #AI, that is.

This is my personal journal about my learning journey in AI and ML for marketing. With over twenty years of experience managing and marketing tech companies, I possess deep knowledge of marketing analytics and attribution, always focused on generating measurable and meaningful business results. For the last nine years, I've advised and served marketing leaders in tech companies, enabling me to share my insights on the impacts of AI and ML, including privacy and ethics issues, through this Substack. You can learn more about me, including my policy on the use of AI for this blog, in the "About" section of this Substack. I welcome your suggestions for further education on AI and ML.

In This Issue:

• What I Know, So Far

• Playing With Midjourney Bing Images

• Celebrating Humanity
  

What I Know, So Far: Month Two

Since recovering from Covid, I’ve been immersed in the world of AI for Marketing. I’ve been attending online sessions, reading(finding links from Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all kinds of sources), listening to podcasts, and exploring prompts and tools.

Almost daily, there’s news out there that in a prior world, would be earth-shattering for at least a week. Because I write to know what I think I’m taking time in this post to summarize what I know so far. This list is written for someone who asks me what they need to know, right now.

As this is a lengthy post including a discussion about privacy/ethics, and contains plenty of bookmarks, I’m skipping that for this issue.

It’s Real. It’s Here.

I empathize with the horror of entering a simple prompt into ChatGPT and seeing it spit out a perfectly written post in seconds. Some writer friends are terrified and angry about these tools. Some marketing friends are frozen in fear, overwhelmed by information.

Others wonder if it's just hype. It's not. I've made a career out of debunking hype cycles. I advise against installing new tools to solve people and process problems. I rarely sound the alarm about new technology. But the last time I saw technology like this was when I saw the Apple iPhone. I dragged people into the Apple Store and said, 'Look at this. I don't know how, but it's going to change everything.'

Consider yourself dragged into the 'AI and ML store.'

Change Is Coming Within Months, Not Years.

There is a strong possibility that many people will lose their jobs because of AI, and the job losses are going to affect knowledge workers faster than any of us thought possible. As a society, we must start to have the conversations needed to manage the impacts. But in the very near future, the marketer who uses AI will be more employable than the marketer who does not. It’s time to get to work to make sure you have a strong base of understanding.

Suggested actions:

1. Get a ChatGPT account and pay for GPT-4. Bonus: Get a Midjourney account.

2. Try prompt cheat sheets. Here’s one I like.

3. Check out the Marking AI Institute site. I’m also planning on attending their conference in Cleveland in late July. Let me know if you are planning to attend. Their podcast is also quite useful but goes a level deeper than this substack, so be prepared for some information overload.

4. Do it a little bit each day or every other day.

5. Use it in your personal life. (I used ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing to research leg of lamb recipes this weekend.)"

A brief dictionary of terms for marketers, because the language is evolving in real-time.

As of April 2023, here’s my best understanding of the terms I’m using.

• AI (Artificial Intelligence, aka “narrow AI” and in some cases “generative AI”): AI that is used for specific and narrow purposes. Prior to ChatGPT’s general release in November 2022, narrow AI was in use in many ways, from generating search results in Google to developing cancer treatments. In marketing right now, AI is a buzzword that stands in for a very specific kind of AI called “Generative AI,” which is based on Large Language models (LLMs.). This is where tools like ChatGPT, Copy.Ai, Midjourney, and the literally thousands of companies started up right now sit.

• AGI (Artificial General Intelligence aka “strong AI”): this is what most of us would have described as AI a few months ago. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but it is real. It’s just much farther away, by most estimates about a decade. Some experts think it will never come. The experts don’t even agree on how to define it. Therefore, AGI is not on the table for marketers in the foreseeable future so it’s beyond the scope of this Substack.

AI Today Will Bullshit You. But It’s Not Sentient. Proceed with Caution.

Yes, we all shivered a little when Bing told NY Times reporter Kevin Roose to leave his wife. At the same time, it’s important to remember he was speaking with a computer program, not a primitive human being. The only thing Bing/ChatGPT/Bard can do is summarize what it has been trained on. As I explained above, all things called “AI” right now are “narrow AI.”

In this case, Bing is based on GPT, and it includes vast swaths of the internet, with all its misinformation, hate, and spam. It can synthesize vast amounts of information quickly, but it will also make up things when it doesn't know what to say. The experts call it “hallucinating,” but it’s really more like that person who bullshits when they don’t know the answer instead of saying they just don’t know. Take its advice to leave your wife with a grain of salt and always fact-check.

Incidentally, this is why generative images on Midjourney have weird feet and hands because the models are trained on existing internet images, which are heavily skewed to faces.

Don’t Enter Sensitive Information Into AI Tools Without A Lawyer’s Advice. Or Why “On-Prem” AI doesn’t exist in marketing yet.

Recently I was on a webinar where several organizations were using ChatGPT to provide various marketing tasks.

In at least two cases, the companies were unaware of the risk of entering sensitive data into ChatGPT tools and others like it. This is NOT like Google Docs or other cloud services. If you are using the public chat function, or scripting through a browser, everything you provide is being used to train the model. Samsung found out the hard way. Note that many “AI companies” are simply putting a UX “skin” on top of ChatGPT’s technology. Ask questions and call a lawyer before inputting sensitive data and information.

You’d think we’d have all learned our lessons after Facebook, but apparently not.

Yes, if you sign up for the API, Bing/OpenAI is now opting you out of collecting your data by default, but they still retain some of that data for a period of time. To get a truly private version of the Chat GPT model, you have to apply and be granted that private version. I have yet to find an instance of “on-prem” AI for marketing tasks for anyone but companies with lots of engineers to manage the issues —please correct me if I am wrong on this!

Marketing Analytics AI: Not Yet Ready for Prime Time.

As I’m a specialist in analytics and marketing attribution, I’m paying close attention to evolution in this space. I believe the privacy issue will be a major barrier to new entrants, and until this is figured out, I remain skeptical of marketing analytics AI. There has been so much hype in this space over the years like that seen around CDPs, that has come to nothing.

Marketing analytics problems are almost always people problems. The biggest challenge we have in marketing analytics is getting people to take action on the data.

As a result, I will be watching for tools that leverage cohorts of user data and simplify the interaction with the data via chat tools; vs trying to sell solutions for personalized marketing. If you are a company working on using AI in marketing analytics, I want to talk with you and see your product. My clients need you. This conversation can be on or off the record.

Immediate Opportunities Exist For Workflow Efficiency. It’s Going to Get Very Messy.

Today, your company can create massive efficiencies in workflows. I’ve got enough experience with ChatGPT4 to tell me that for many, many social media teams, it’s good enough, once you know a bit about how to prompt.

If a writer can generate 10x the social media /email/blog posts in 1/10th the time, and assuming the same number of content pieces are made (because honestly, the world doesn’t need MORE emails and social media, right? ), then fewer people are needed in the workforce.

Agencies: those that don’t adapt to this quickly, will go out of business. Right now many clients/marketers are like deer in a headlight: they’re not sure what way to go. That will change, quickly; especially if I’m doing this Substack right. 😈 Soon they’ll be asking agencies how they are using AI, and when they can stop paying $10,000 for something that is being done in 1/10th the time. And while yes, having humans review content and edit, and shape it, is important; “good enough” will be enough for many people.

In-house marketers: it’s time to start to think about your headcount and your agency use. Marketing is already the toughest job in tech; and it’s about to get tougher when your CEO /CFO asks which of your five writers is no longer necessary.

Practioners/Consultants/Employees: When that question the in-house marketer gets asked, how are you going to be prepared to answer? What bots are you training? How are you making your work more efficient?

Prompt Engineering Is Temporary

Speaking of prompt engineering, don’t get too enamored of it. The tech industry has a vested interest in having as many people using AI as possible, and to that end, they are going to invest a great deal in making it easier and easier to get what you need out of AI tools.

For Gen X, think about this like a command line prompt: necessary for a while, but abstracted away for most of us, thankfully.

Training AI For Your Company Is The Future

Right now, the narrower the AI is, the more effective it is, and thus the more ROI it provides. ChatGPT 4 is amazing, but tools that can tailor it for writers and marketers are even more efficient.

Now, imagine what could happen if you train ChatGPT on your website with thousands of pages, so that when it writes social media, it writes it in your style. Imagine it integrated with SalesForce Einstein and all your internal documents. (with the caveat I said earlier about the lack of “on-prem” AI for anyone but big companies just yet).

Bloomberg just announced that.

Companies that behave like Bloomberg will beat those that do not.

Domain Expertise Matters More Than Ever

As ageist as Silicon Valley is, we experts have the advantage this time. Every company is going to be seeking out domain experts to sniff out the bullshit and train the models.

For example, if you’re an expert writer, CMOs want to hire you to not only to know when it’s time to have a human write something but also to review the output of bots and writers that use them. They want to be able to trust you to train the tools on your company’s unique voice and style. CMOs trust your take on which writer tools to use because they know they don’t have your grammar and editing and proofreading skills.

This is Gen X’s Moment.

Not only is Gen X more likely to possess the deep domain knowledge to detect the sophisticated bullshit AI tools are putting out; we’re also still young enough to be able to learn quickly and adapt.

We have the benefits of age- more leadership experience, better discretion, judgment, an appreciation for the nuance and complexity of life, as well as a memory of life without computers. But we’re young enough to be excited about seeing the change this next phase will bring.

We’ve seen some things, but expect to live long enough to benefit from AI.

Of course, this is a vast generalization. Some boomers are not shying away. Some millennials have their heads in the sand.

But Sam Altman said that he thinks he’s not the right person to run OpenAI in the future. There’s a lot I have disagreed with Sam on, but I will give him credit for starting to grasp this. (Whether he does anything about it remains to be seen.)

But I stand by this statement: Gen X will lead us in this time. Our “middle child, latchkey ” experiences have prepared us perfectly to assess and lead through this important transition.

Did I miss anything? Let me know.

Celebrating Humanity: Holy Edition

As several major religions celebrated important holidays in the last week, here’s an example of one thing that connects them: taking care of the poor.

A church in Winston-Salem, NC, purchased nearly $3.3 million in outstanding medical debt in three counties for 3400 families. They held a debt-burning ceremony in the church and you should watch it.

They take donations. And they don’t have to be huge:

"Some of the poorer folks that we deal with get a medical bill of $1,000 or $3,000. It might as well be 10 million they just can't deal with it," Jackman said. "For them to get the letter that says that’s forgiven I think is such a relief."

Playing With Midjourney Bing Images

Unfortunately, I was unable to get Substack’s image generate to work with the prompt I used in Midjourney. But, I got access to Bing’s image generator and fed it the exact prompt I used to start this blog. Here’s the output. It really took" “graffiti style” to heart and certainly seems less of “The Last of Us apocalypse” vibe than Midjourney, though now I feel my avatar looks like Dora the Explorer.

Prompt: graffiti style, happy ten year old girl with short dark hair and glasses, in a friendly forest, with a helpful pet horned owl, --aspect 3:2

What’s Next

• I’m reading this book on Marketing AI and will write a report on it after I read it. I do recommend the AI marketing institute and its podcast. I’ve attended several of their sessions and listened to the podcast, and so far, they’re doing a great job of summarizing things, while balancing hype and risks.

• Do you know someone who would be a great guest on my podcast this year? I’m looking for people who know about the history of AI for marketing.

• If you work for a company that’s integrating AI into its marketing technology, I’d like to talk with you, on or off the record. Please send me an email or ping me on LinkedIn.