AI vs. Marketing Professionals
As a marketer I am always asked whether AI has taken my job yet. The answer is “not yet”, but often includes rather too much inarticulate waffle in response (a bit like a word cloud based on marketing cliches and including phrases like ‘marketing tool’). The fact is, I’ve been a bit less worried than a lot of my peers, for two reasons:
- Firstly, it’s not AI, it’s a Large Language Model (LLM) which is not the same thing. It’s just a chatbot that mimics language, conversation and copy based on an algorithm.
- Secondly, it’s not even close to being good enough and it really, really needs humans to be of any use at all.
After such bold statements, let me explain my thinking a little…
It’s not really AI
ChatGPT is sold as AI, but it isn’t actually the type of AI that keeps us up at night; it is Artificial Narrow Intelligence, or ANI, which you can read more about here.
It calculates how to respond to sequences of words, or prompts, and is very task-specific. It’s a language processor. In practice, it looks like it’s taking words in, thinking about it and coming up with an answer. However, it’s essentially just an algorithm with several layers and it’s only as good as the prompts it receives and the content it is able to draw from. It’s very limited and certainly more limited than even a very junior marketer.
At this point I am sure I don’t need to compare the limitations of A(N)I to the mass of skills that a good marketer can wield, let alone start on the difference between stringing words together and actual communication. I did want to just quickly point it out though, so you have this in mind as you read on.
AI is nowhere near good enough to replace marketing expertise
It really isn’t. I can’t emphasis this enough. It’s fair to say that it currently has it’s uses, including the creation of filler content (it can churn out copy for 20 social media posts in a matter of seconds), it supports marketing teams in idea generation, and it can pump out a bog-standard meeting agenda in two blinks of an eye. I can’t deny that stuff is helpful and does save time. Plus, who knows where LLMs will end up – perhaps there is a basic admin role for them? Or perhaps more, depending on how good they get. Yet, that’s the sticking point for me – how good can these LLMs really be if they are simply an algorithm, focused on tasks and using some corners of the internet (without access to the really good bits that are all subject to copywrite and behind secure paywalls) to generate a sequence of words that lack these majorly important elements:
- Context;
- The ability to understand the facts and respond meaningfully;
- Emotional intelligence; and
- Insight and experience.
If we employed team members without these attributes, they wouldn’t last long. So, why is there suddenly a drive to use AI instead of human beings with experience who exhibit some, if not all, of the above.
Any company that thinks it can rely on LLMs to replace the expertise of a real-life human being with communications and marketing experience has a profound misunderstanding of what great marketing is.
I say marketing to incorporate the many facets of it, from communications, PR, brand management, campaign management, and so on. Which brings me to point number three…
AI is the chaff and humans are the Wheat
Having had ten years’ experience working in PR and Communications’, and nearly 20 years in Sales and Marketing roles, I know what works: what makes something interesting. It’s not about a company (metaphorically) screaming out it’s defined messages to a busy market place with as much content as it can muster, it’s so much more nuanced and targeted than that.
It’s about knowing your audiences (all of them), getting intimate with a brand and what it means for organisations and their customers, and then understanding what is needed across the breadth of content creation – from award submissions, social media posts and press activity, to name a very few. The creativity, empathy and commitment to continuous development that we marketers have means we strive, always, for killer content, not just filler content – and yes, REALLY, LLMs don’t do that.
LLMs don’t create cut-through in a busy market. Instead, they generate reams of content ready to squeeze into the meaningless mele of noise we find online already. It’s like pouring water into sand… it makes it all so much denser and heavier and you can’t really tell it’s there.
Content created by these LLMs or chatbots, like ChatGPT, just doesn’t land with human beings in the same way that well-constructed messages and genuinely compelling narratives do. The content it churns out is authentically disingenuous and weak because it’s simply put together using a calculation that predicts the next likely word based on inputs and prompts. That’s just not how human beings communicate.
Perhaps there is a small admin role for LLMs in every team, but they can’t be trusted on their own and they have a growing catalogue of quite tremendously bad errors when left to do their own work.
It’s not even really a marketing tool, but an administrative support tool for every team. It is also very safe to say that, at this stage, those companies that stay human will certainly triumph.
