AI, AI, oh!
I joined a webinar today about the potential of AI in marketing, and what I saw was very impressive, but also rather scary.
3/5/20241 min read
We’ve probably all been hearing rumours that AI technology could very soon eliminate the need for humans to write or design generally anything that involves communicating to other humans.
It’s understandable to fear the death knell of content writing as a profession, and none of us want to go the way of the town crier or, if you’ll pardon my language, the soda jerk, which sounds more like a Saturday night distraction than a full-time job quite commonplace several decades ago.
The team at MMC Learning who hosted today’s event showed us just how far AI has come in a very short time.
We were shown some impressive examples over the hour-long webinar, with initial emphasis on the visual potential of it all, through pictures created by keywords, ranging from surreal cartoon illustrations to 4K photo-effect images with incredible close-up detail.
Videos were also mind-bending in some of their realism – not only might you be able to select the speech in one of 20 or more languages, but the lip sync matches it perfectly. This technology hasn’t yet been applied to the UK versions of German Calgon TV ads but let’s pray that it is soon.
This all led to the bit I was waiting for followed some examples of how the tech can be applied to the written word too. Albeit this webinar was focused on marketing, what was created by machine seemed scarily good and as the presenters said, the finished product saved huge amounts of time and money over the person-made equivalent.
Whether what looked great over a ten-minute presentation would be seen the same after close scrutiny I don’t know.
But all this is not necessarily great news for those developing the tech either, with some people predicting that perhaps 75% of software engineer roles could be redundant over the next few years. The Terminator time-travelled from a self-aware AI-created Judgment Day in 2029, so best watch this space.

