Once the AI/ML/LLM hype has settled down a bit, we’re going to find ourselves having undergone a step change in the way we work.
There are many reasons not to like the deluge of ‘AI-this’ and ‘machine learning-that’ which surrounds us. Some are quite rational, others more emotional.
There’s fear: “It feels like all my experience and skills are being devalued. What happens to the human touch and creativity if we hand things over to AI?” There’s the loss of creativity: “Machines just analyse data and spit out what’s statistically probable. That’s not real marketing.” There’s mistrust of technology: “How can I trust that AI isn’t just another overhyped fad that will crash and burn, leaving the business with massive sunk costs? There’s over-reliance on data: “Marketing is about understanding people, not just numbers. A data-driven approach might lead to a lack of genuine connection with the audience.” And there’s the concern about the data: “Are we sacrificing customers’ privacy just to get a slight edge in targeting ads? I don’t want to be part of that.”
Most of us have these worries, and others. But once the hype has settled down a bit, we’re going to find ourselves having undergone a step change in the way we work. Pushing it all away for now, to see how it all pans out, will give us a potentially insurmountable task to catch up.
Saving effort without reducing quality
What I’m doing is using all the tools that catch my eye, to see if they can save me effort without reducing quality – or provide me with opportunities I simply wouldn’t have. Just as a small example, in that second paragraph above, I wanted to list some reasons why we might give the AI hype a wide berth. This could easily have taken me more than 20 minutes of staring out of the window. Instead, I got ChatGPT to produce a list which was pretty good, in a few seconds.
Had I got it to come up with the original idea for this article? No. Did I get it to write it for me once I’d had the idea? No. You’d have been able to tell if I had.
Will some system be able to do all that invisibly in the future?
Yes. But I’ll have seen it coming and will have moved on, so I won’t care.
It’s not going away
‘AI ‘ is not going away, so don’t ignore it in the hope it will.
Google’s John Mueller wrote: “You can’t be ‘I hate AI and will never use it’ if you want to work in a tech-related field. The hype will die down a bit, people will get tired of it, and some of the stupid uses of AI/LLMs will hopefully be reduced, but there are a ton of amazing advances out of the technologies over the past years which make a lot of sense that will remain and evolve further.”
Writer Barry Schwartz quoted this and added: “I mean, this is not much of a prediction, but it is a good heads up that we need to be more accepting of it, even if we don’t like how it is working right now. We should continue to play with it, see how it works, and experiment with it so we are not left behind.”
That’s sound advice. Look out for new ideas and tools, embrace any developments, and have fun with them. We don’t need to over-commit to anything.