AI in Marketing

I have seen a lot of articles about the use of AI and how dangerous it can be and that it could take over the world! 

From a less apocalyptical view I would like to share my experiences of AI so far.  To be honest I was very sceptical myself, being of a certain age, but I have always prided my self on keeping up with technology, so I decided to give it a try. Here are my findings:

Website Content

My first use of AI was to write content for a client's website. The business was one that I did not have any experience of working in, so it was a good test of the power of AI.

The AI software of choice was Writesonic. I entered the title, added some keywords and pressed go. The article was produced in a few minutes and read well, but as I said before, due to the lack of knowledge of the industry, I did not know whether it would be accurate or not. I sent it to the business owner who had been in this industry for over 40 years, so if anything was incorrect, he would be sure to point it out!

After reading through the content he was impressed!

One issue we picked up was that when the content was generated, the software had defaulted to American English, this caused issues with spelling but was easily corrected to English (British) in the settings.

Blog Articles

My next test was creating an article for another client, this time in a very different industry. I started by adding the title and keywords, but also adding links to relevant pre-written articles to help set the theme.

This time the article was much longer and detailed. It read well, but did seem to have an automated feel.

I sent it to the client for review.  His was not as impressed! Several parts of the article had been duplicated and a lot of the spelling was US English even though I had chosen UK. He is an avid content writer and his first impression was that it you could tell it had not been written by a human, it was missing emotion. So the second test was not as successful.

Images

The third test was creating AI images for a poster.

A client needed an image that was very specific, but also high quality for an A1 sized poster. We looked at the usual images for sale on the standard stock image sites, but nothing fitted the specification, so I tried using a free AI image generator.

I entered a description and a few keywords and waited for the rendered image. It was a masterpiece!

The generated image was very high quality, detailed and surreal. This fitted the subject perfectly. It was a fantasy theme so it did not need to look realistic. It was only then that I noticed the fingers! One thing AI seems to get wrong regularly is how many fingers a human has on each hand, seven is not correct.

I amended this by overlaying the extra digits with text and images and it worked. I showed the client and they loved it!

The final printed version looked great. So almost there but no cigar!

Conclusion

AI is an amazing jump in technology, but has it's limitations, I have found AI works well with factual information, it can scour the internet in seconds and then generate articles or content much faster than I can. It can create amazing images that far out way the human imagination in some instances, but not necessarily anatomically correct!

However, when it comes to writing with feeling, emotion or empathy, AI clearly struggles where the human brain triumphs.

Although it can save time and open up ideas that have not been previously considered, I think it has a way to go before it will be able to completely replace humans in the workplace, if at all.

And while AI continues to plot against us, I will go and put the kettle on, something else AI can't do, or can it?