🤖 AI is a tool, not an employee

Read time: 3 minutes, 30 seconds

Have you been paying attention to the artificial intelligence revolution, ?

I have, and many of us in the digital marketing space find it hard to talk about anything else these days. I haven’t written much about AI, though, because it’s hard to summarize "AI" in just a few paragraphs of an email newsletter.

New AI developments and tools that seem to emerge hourly, but here’s what I think about artificial intelligence right now:

There’s so much more to come. Most of the conversation about AI over the last year and a half has been about large language models like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (formerly Bard), and about image generation tools like Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

But word and image generation is just the tip of a mammoth artificial intelligence iceberg that has amazing implications for science, engineering, medicine, finance, and national defense.

Beware the fear. There is more fear than fact in mainstream media accounts about artificial intelligence. Do not rely on your favorite news website or the nightly news to learn about AI.

It’s a tool, not an employee. The use of AI language models will likely cause job losses, but "AI" will not replace humans. It’s a tool, like a pen, printing press, typewriter, computer or mobile device. If you learn to use the tool, you’ll be employable (or able to work for yourself).

Allow the data collection. Newspapers and other media companies are foolish to try to prevent AI language models from reading their content. The models learn by digesting enough reading material to understand context and be able to predict what letters and words come _ _ _ _.

These AI models are not regurgitating whole articles or books.

Lots of legislation to come. Under current law, works generated by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted. It will be a long time before governments and the court system establish rules for the use of artificial intelligence. There will be many pros and cons to consider.

Adding to internet bloat. As if there isn’t enough junk content on the internet, AI language models will produce even more because people will be too lazy to edit and fact-check. Be a critical reader of, well, everything.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help with my work, and I’m amazed at what it can do.
It’s helped me identify topics for social media posts, write website content, outline a training class, and even write website tags for search engine optimization. It is a draft writer, not the creator of polished content.

If you want to learn more about AI language models and how they work, here are some recommendations:

Subscribe to Christopher S. Penn’s weekly newsletter, https://www.christopherspenn.com/newsletter. The newsletter contains links to videos and courses, some free and some paid, about various AI-related topics.
Follow the work of the Marketing AI Institute, its founder Paul Roetzer and its chief content officer Mike Kaput.
Read the book, "The Age of AI And Our Human Future," by the late Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Danie Huttenlocher.
And finally, pick a free version of one of the tools and play around with it.

This Week’s Jargon: Pain Point

The phrase "pain point" is the marketing version of a dandelion. It pops up everywhere and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. No matter what you’re selling or marketing, you’ve been instructed to identify your customers’ pain points.

For my part, I can’t help but think of Mr. Spock’s knock-out neck pinch.

"Pain point" is just another way of saying "problem," except it’s alliterative and it does evoke a mental wince as if you are being pinched.

When marketers ask about your pain points, they want to know your problems so they can identify a product or service that will help alleviate the pain (like an aspirin?).

In the same vein, they might also ask the tired question, "What keeps you up at night?" That’s just another way of asking "What do you worry about?"

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Until Next Time

The next newsletter arrives April 9. By then, we’ll be more than a week into the Major League Baseball season. We’ll be recovering from an exhausting weekend of watching college basketball tournament games, culminating in the men’s championship game April 8.

As ever, be grateful. Be generous. Be patient. Love.

Thanks for spending some of your time with me, . I appreciate you.

Mark

P.S. - This newsletter was 100 percent created by me, a human.

P.P.S. - Some links in this email might be affiliate links, which could generate small commissions for me at no extra cost to you.