Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
What did you dream?
It’s alright we told you what to dream
— “Welcome to the Machine,” (from Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here)
Recently, I was watching an interview that Pink Floyd lyricist Roger Waters gave about the many famous albums the band produced in the 1970s. One of those was 1975’s Wish You Were Here, which contained the great title track and the song “Welcome to the Machine.” For whatever reason, I always think about that latter song and its lyrics whenever someone mentions the AI revolution we’re currently experiencing.
And the reason is this: Generative AI, to me, is “that machine” reflected in the lyrics above. And while Waters wasn’t alluding directly to that while writing the lyrics in the 1970s[1], the fact is, he was eerily prescient about such future capabilities. Back then, the machine to him was that “monstrous grinding thing…that denied humanity” to people.
In this early phase of Generative AI, it’s certainly not that extreme by any means. But dig a bit deeper. Isn’t AI ruthlessly efficient and analytical? It doesn’t have feelings, doesn’t experience pain, love, fear, ambition, hate, or anxiety – and, dangerously, it doesn’t have any scruples. It can “tell you what to dream” and you don’t have to do anything in a sense. You sit back and let it do the work for you.
In that way, it has an allure for companies beyond anything we’ve experienced in recent memory.
That’s why so many marketers have rushed headlong into this new revolution. I’m certainly curious about it too, yet also still a bit hesitant for several reasons. Like anything else, I think it’s worth taking a step back and looking hard at what AI is, where it’s going, what it can reasonably do for you, and what it can’t do –before you go all in.
First, a little recent history on AI and marketing.
Enter ChatGPT and the World of Generative AI
While AI itself has been used in marketing for many years in advertising (to match buyers and sellers), social media (sentiment analysis), and email marketing (to suggest subject line copy or optimal body copy), certainly nothing prepared the industry for November 30, 2022, with the launch of ChatGPT. Indeed, where generative AI was simply theoretical before that date, it was very much a reality after.
What is generative AI? Think of generative AI as a kind of advanced branch of artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional machine learning, which uses algorithms to enable systems to learn from and make predictions or decisions based on data, generative AI takes it a step further in a sense. It utilizes those same machine learning techniques to generate new, original content such as images, text, audio, and video.
It’s a game-changer for marketing in particular. Now anyone with a computer and access to the Internet can create content quickly, in pretty much any format. Individuals can also create their own GPT in a sense, customizing it for their own library of content. What’s more, what OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) did in essence was open floodgates for other companies to expand into generative artificial intelligence. There are so many AI applications that it’s hard to know where to start – even television newscasts are being created completely without humans. And I’ve seen those newscasts. You can’t tell that the newscasters aren’t real, or it was not written by real people.
A Lot of Content Production, But Still No Soul
So, if that’s where it’s all going, what do you need people for? Or even real marketers? I don’t know about you, but the scary part is that the machines are, in a sense, learning to be human and they can already mimic the actions, behaviors, writings, and spoken words of real people pretty accurately – and make fewer mistakes than a normal person would. For sure, a machine will be able to tell more jokes than any human can, because it knows hundreds of millions of them in every language. It will also eventually be able to add vocal emphasis or mimic other human traits in a much more profound way than we can probably imagine.
So, what’s missing? I don’t know about you, but there’s a part of me that when I read these articles written 100 percent by a machine or watch a video produced with an avatar or see images that look life-like, it’s almost too good – technically. The punctuation and grammar are perfect. The sentences flow like a textbook on writing might suggest. The cadence of speaking is exact. The images of people are those, of course, with perfect, symmetrical faces. But it’s missing that “thing” – the individual human stories, the experiences, and the flaws — not to mention the creativity to be able to still connect two things that may seem different but could be actually related in people’s minds.
For example, could a machine connect a Pink Floyd song written about losing one’s humanity in the 1970s with AI, if it wasn’t directly stated? (Then again, maybe another human wouldn’t think to do that either…for good reason.)
In that same vein, what are the nuances of how that song or any song made you feel? Or how you remember a particular song and what you were doing when it came out? Or the pain you felt every time you heard a certain song because it reminded you of someone or something? A machine will never know this piece and won’t be able to translate that human emotion you feel. Only you can. After all, you have a soul. AI does not.
Use AI to Help You Get Started on Content But You Should Finish the Job
That’s why when we talk to our clients about the production of any content, AI is still not the be-all and end-all. It’s great at helping you get started or even thinking through the areas you might want to cover – or give you new ideas for ways to approach things. But to make whatever content you’re producing really good, you have to add that “bit of you” – how you or your company think about things in your own unique way or how you see the world based on your experience. That’s what will add value to this faceless AI content world. Remember, it’s a tool. It’s not an end product.
[1] When asked about the song’s meaning, Waters mentioned that it was about “all of our experiences in the face of that monstrous grinding thing that chews us up and spits us out…denying our humanity.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9UkOlBDZbY) Obviously, Waters was not talking about generative AI but the fact is, machines may take us on a path through which our humanity may not always come through. –
