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A new battlefront in the Tech Wars heated up last week with Microsoft’s announcement and hands-on demo of new AI capabilities in its Bing search engine and Edge browser. Google quickly followed suit by announcing its own conversational AI in a blog post on Monday and at an event in Paris later in the week. This all comes on the heels of ChatGPT’s launch late last year, which eclipsed 1M users in 5 days and 100M in less than two months.

With all the buzz, we wanted to take a pulse on public opinion and understanding of this emergent technology, so we surveyed 1,000 US Consumers on Tuesday this week. Here’s what we found…

NEWS STILL BREAKING THROUGH

While last week felt like a whirlwind of announcements and media coverage, it’s important to keep in mind that news about AI-powered search is only just beginning to break through to the masses. 17% of those we surveyed said they had heard a “great deal” about AI-powered search recently, and 53% had heard at least “some.” That’s not bad one week in, but there’s a long way to go before companies build mainstream familiarity and understanding of the technology.

DON’T COUNT GOOGLE OUT

Last week did not go as well as Google likely hoped with many headlines focusing on Bard’s inaccurate assertion that the Webb Space Telescope was the first to capture images of an exoplanet and a tepid media response to the event in Paris. But one week’s headlines will not determine the long-term trajectory of who wins the race.

SO WHO HAS THE EDGE?

Disruptor or incumbent? Microsoft certainly has taken the initiative, having released a functional product that is already available to beta testers (and a lengthy waitlist to gain access). They also plan on investing $10 billion into OpenAI. Google is the overwhelming incumbent in the search space, commands vast resources, and has assembled a formidable team that has been working on this technology for many years. The public appears to be favoring Google’s incumbency at this stage.

59% of those who have heard about AI-powered search say Google is best positioned to successfully deliver the technology to market …compared to 13% for Microsoft

Time will tell how much that shifts in the coming weeks and months as familiarity with the companies’ offerings deepens, and more users get their hands on the technology.

Looking forward, consumer excitement is palpable

A lot remains to be seen, but consumer excitement for the technology is building.

71% of those who have heard about AI-powered search say they’re excited about using the technology and 92% say they believe it will change the way people use the Internet. Why? Improved ease and speed of finding information and improved accuracy and relevance of search results are the key benefits driving their excitement.

IMPLICATIONS

As we look ahead, a few thoughts on how this will play out from here…

Finding the Early Adopters

Which companies will effectively find the segments of the population that drive early adoption and help their products cross the chasm? Our data points to the usual suspects as early adopters: Younger consumers (ages 18-34) who skew male, those working full time (who perhaps see workrelated applications/benefits), and more affluent and educated consumers.

Managing Expectations

The potential for conversational AI is clear, but as we’ve already seen, it’s still a work in progress. The process of “deep reinforcement learning” that drives applications like ChatGPT will take time to mature and there will be missteps and inaccurate results in the interim. Continual improvements in accuracy while managing consumer expectations will be important to mass adoption.

Achieving Product-Market Fit

In addition to generating excitement and driving trial, products will need to identify the Jobs to Be Done that will have staying power. With seemingly limitless applications for AI-powered search, what jobs can the technology do for users that deliver the most real, sustained utility? Keying in on these use cases and building products that are optimized for these needs will be critical to gaining a competitive advantage.

Monetization

Even new technologies that find the early adopters and achieve productmarket fit aren’t guaranteed a sustainable path forward—think of AI-powered voice assistants, which have achieved widespread adoption, yet struggled mightily to monetize. How will companies effectively monetize conversational AI? Will they follow the ad-supported playbook that Google has mastered? What subscription- based models will emerge?

Bringing AI into the Light

Now that AI is maturing across a new threshold, and as ChatGPT, Bing and Bard bring multidimensional algorithms forward in a radically new way, there may be an opportunity to incorporate a new level of transparency, education, and understanding of all AI, including existing algorithms that are already deeply interwoven into daily life. This may happen organically, as new AI are introduced; perhaps there is also an opportunity to create distinct and meaningful AI personas for existing tools, with inherent consumer choice built into the experience.

Proceeding Responsibly

There’s been much written about the unintended consequences and potential abuses of AI. Ambiguous and misleading answers, the expression of embedded bias, and the propagation of ideological filter bubbles are all concerns. Conversational AI will almost certainly be a proving ground for the extensive work that Microsoft, Google, and others have put in to anticipate consequences and safeguard against abuses. Close partnership between companies, their users, third parties, and regulatory bodies to ensure a responsible approach will be essential to maximizing the potential benefits of this new technology.

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By: Tim Hawes on February 3, 2023

Associate Strategy Director for Europe, Tim Hawes breaks down generative AI and gathers insights from teams at Assembly on ChatGPT and its applications.

Over the last two years, advancements in generative AI have been taking the world by storm, just check out some of the headlines:

Beethoven’s unfinished Tenth Symphony completed by artificial intelligence.

Why It’s So Hard to Resist Turning Your Selfies Into Lensa AI Art.

How a deepfake Tom Cruise on TikTok turned into a very real AI company.

ChatGPT passes exams from law and business schools.

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Generative AI utilises machine learning to create new and unbelievably real digital content with minimal human intervention, leaving many questioning the ethical role this tech plays in our everyday lives. In practice, brands and marketers are assessing how these tools will impact their work and the future of their industries.  

We spoke with some of the brilliant minds at Assembly to get their points of view and what they’re excited about when it comes to generative AI.

What can generative AI be used for, other than creating AI art of cats?

Tim Hawes, Associate Strategy Director for Europe: It has a tone of utility already and its rate of development is astounding. It seems like a new AI for “X” is released or posted every day. It can pretty much answer any question you throw at it (ChatGPT, that is). It’s like a chat-based Wikipedia in that regard. I’ve asked it to explain history, maths and random facts or even write some marketing headlines or code snippets. It can write recipes – which is what really kickstarted my renewed interest in it. I watched a video where a chef explains her preferences; type of meal and the bot outputs a full menu and instructions for a full Indian-inspired thanksgiving dinner.

Other than cats, it (DALL-E) can create some genuinely interesting art, some can come out looking a little uncanny valley-esque though, depending on what you ask it to generate. There are AIs for everything,  theresanaiforthat.com is a database of many of them; I wouldn’t be surprised if an AI curated it. Because of the way that the ChatGPT  is trained, it can recount any set of information it has ingested, merging sources together and creating ‘new’ text, depending on how you prompt it. You can even ask it to ‘speak’ in a particular mode or instruct it to take on a particular role.

So as far as “what else CAN a generative AI do?” with enough quality input I’d be asking “what can’t it do?”

Are there limitations with ChatGPT and similar tech?

Pedro Mona, Global Director Martech & Data: Two of the major factors limiting scale right now are server capacity issues and computing power – ChatGPT was down recently because half of LinkedIn were trying to access it at the same time. There are also organisations using ChatGPT to churn out essays and sell them to university students, granted the work was brilliant, however, the machine didn’t seem to understand the concept of referencing. So, plagiarism and duplicate content could certainly be an issue – which brings us back to my point on training models specific to clients and brands. On the topic of coding, it’s certainly got applications in shortening writing time but it’s essentially not much different from stealing code from the slew of libraries out there anyway – that’s what everyone already does.

David Hidasi, Senior Data Scientist: In the role of data science, it can help us to generate and fill holes in data as well as create basic functions and give us shortcuts for coding – which humans can then elaborate on and develop. We’re not there yet as far as relying on it end-to-end, there will always be some requirement for testing and human curation – given the pre-trained nature of the networks.

What does AI mean for marketers and brands?

Kristie Naha-Biswas, Head of Strategy & Planning for Europe: AI is pretty amazing, but frightening at the same time.  The ability to produce content faster and more efficiently than humans may be appealing to brands or procurement as a new cost-efficient evolution in their marketing deployment, but there is one vital human component that this technology still lacks, which is empathy and emotion. Emotion is what makes art, in any form be that a painter or a musician, unique.  Art is a human expression of emotion that cannot be replicated by AI, it is the artists’ personal experience and original thought that elicits an emotional response from their audience – do we love it or hate it. Advertising creative is no different. Emotionally led and real, insight driven ideas are what makes creative distinct so brands can stand out to build that critical mental availability vital to any successful brand formula. I think there is a future role for how we can use AI to drive greater personalisation of a piece of content, or messages from an overarching creative idea, or concept.

Pedro Mona, Global Head of Data and Martech: The way agencies and brands are going to win with generative AI is integrating it into human-assisted workflows – where maybe an analyst could work on one or two things at a time, now maybe its three or five at once! Training and integrating generative AI models into a brand, where it understands the tone – the voice of the brand – will take it much further to “on brand” content than its current public training models. I see big applications for content in this regard.

The most interesting part is testing human versus AI versus human + AI. In my previous experience producing predictive models for media performance, the human-assisted AI campaign won by a landslide – the input quality and the human context for the brand and therefore analysis bore the best results. While I don’t see it replacing search engines entirely (the ability to index up-to-date data isn’t there yet) it has wonderful applications for accessibility – text to speech rendering and explanation of advanced topics can have brilliant utility for the visually impaired, for example. Ultimately, I think it’s going to become the new standard, improve parallel workflows and companies that can utilise it in the context of their own brands. There will always be an element of human intervention in quality control and analysis that I don’t see going away any time soon.

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By: Rafe Needleman, SVP, Technology Content, Allison+Partners

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Artificial Intelligence will change your job — not in five years, not next year, but now. If you’re not 100% convinced, spend some time experimenting with ChatGPT, the conversational chatbot released into open beta by OpenAI in November 2022. ChatGPT is the first free and easy–to–use chat product based on the groundbreaking GPT 3 Large Language Model (LLM). 

The product is a web-based chat system you can have a real conversation with. It is uncanny how well it constructs text output based on almost any input. It can answer questions, generate what appear to be original ideas and hold a decent conversation on any topic. It can also create plausible technical documentation, such as computer code and macros, and food recipes.  

If you haven’t already tried it, you should. This technology will have a huge impact on communications, marketing and advertising. It will change your job, as much as the introduction of the internet did.   

For many people, ChatGPT provides the first glimpse into what this type of AI will do for us in the future. It is both amazing and terrifying. And the revolution starts today.  

Here’s what to know to get started: 

1. You can use ChatGPT today to improve your productivity.

ChatGPT a great collaborator for generating ideas and outlines. Experiencing writer’s block? Ask ChatGPT to help get you going. Try “Outline an article about…” for starters.  

ChatGPT is also good at getting you up to speed on new topics (Try, “Explain Kubernetes”) and summarizing meetings and complex stories: Type, “Give me the bullet points for this:” and then paste in text from a transcript or story. It can even write Excel macros and more advanced computer code. As part of your existing workflow, ChatGPT can be a great starting point. But keep in mind it can’t (yet) replace all your human skills. Keep reading for why.  

2. ChatGPT lies.

ChatGPT is designed to create text that fits a linguistic model. While it is often useful and accurate, it does frequently make stuff up out of nowhere. In some instances, it gets facts completely wrong (ChatGPT seems to be convinced Russia has sent several bears into space, for example; it hasn’t!). Even if it has the correct information in its enormous corpus of knowledge, that doesn’t mean it understands it, and its output can sound completely plausible while being far off target. It’s also critical to remember ChatGPT was trained in 2021. It knows nothing about the world after that.  

Simply put, you can’t trust ChatGPT for accuracy. Always verify what it gives you. 

3. The field is evolving fast, and you need policies.

If you’re going to use this technology, it’s important to lay out clear guidelines as to how. For example, if you use ChatGPT to write an article for a client, does that need to be disclosed? How about if you use it to prepare social media copy? Let’s say you ask it to write a blog post optimized for a particular audience or SEO. Or maybe you just use it to get an article outline started. Is that something you need to tell stakeholders? 

Communications companies have already caught flack for using generative AI to create content. Publications like CNET have used ChatGPT to write articles for months, The Associated Press has incorporated some kind of AI since 2015, and even The Washington Post employed it to help write for the 2020 Presidential Election. They are all still working out how to use it and how they should publicly disclose its use for written articles.  

You must work out how you incorporate the technology into your day-to-day work in a responsible way.  Make it clear how your teams should and shouldn’t use the tool, knowing its limitations and pitfalls. And make sure you communicate this to partners and customers.  

4. Meet the “AI Native”

The capability of AI to generate original and useful creative work at scale will prove to be one of the foundational technologies of the 21st century. It will change how we live, work, learn and even think. The children born into this world will be “AI natives” and will understand the world of ideas in a different way from their parents. We can hope this technology will mostly be used to advance the way we learn and think, just as calculators changed our relationship with math. But we simply do not know yet how the developing brain will react to this type of machine intelligence. 

One thing we do need to look out for, though, is a growing digital divide exacerbated by this technology. AI is not cheap to create or run, and some populations may just not have access to it, potentially putting them at an economic disadvantage. It will be a global challenge to create a responsible framework for the distribution of this tech. 

5. Generative AI will impact your job, but it won’t kill it.

The software’s ability to create useful customized content is staggering and fundamental. It will certainly change how you work, as well as the nature of creative work at all levels and in every industry, worldwide.   

However, no matter how useful (or damaging) this technology becomes, AI will always lack imagination, vision and compassion. Adapting to this new technology will not be easy, it is still only a tool, and we can use it to reinforce our best, most human qualities. It will still need you – your humanity, your personality, your perspective and your soul.   

Be ready to change, adapt and embrace this new technology as another tool in your box of tricks. 

Those who ignore the power of AI in communications will fall behind a skills curve. It’s something we’ve already embraced at A+P as one of the many tools we use. And we help clients navigate how to make the most out of this amazing technology. Keep following this blog and our social media feeds on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook as we continue our series on the power of AI.

Disclosure: This story was written by a human.

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By: Aaron Kwittken, Co-Founder and CEO, PRophet

Originally Published in The Drum

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When I launched PRophet in late 2020 I left behind both the ’comforts’ of agency life and the agency I founded. Fast-forward to 2023 and the road less traveled is now a digital super-highway destined to transform the PR industry as we know it, primarily using AI-driven technologies and techniques designed to make modern communicators more productive.