You Might End Up Babysitting a Robot

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a hot topic in marketing and social media. AI-based techniques like machine learning and deep learning have altered the landscape of online marketing from industry-wide efficiency to personalization and bidding strategies.

That's a pretty good intro paragraph on the topic of AI in marketing. It was written by AI (we'll also just refer to it as a robot) in a matter of seconds.

Watch how fast it generated the text.

What if we wanted to write a new Facebook Ad about carpet cleaning? Tell the AI tool that's what you want and seconds later you're in business.

Is this better copy than a human could write? Not necessarily.

But is it worse than most copy that humans write?

No.

So where does that leave us? How do agencies like IMA understand and apply these new tools?

Let's Zoom Out

What is actually happening here. What is this new technology and how does it work?

What is GPT-3 how does it work?

GPT-3 is a neural network model that was trained using internet data to generate any type of text. It requires a small amount of input text to generate large volumes of relevant and sophisticated machine-generated text.

The basic idea behind GPT-3 is that it uses a combination of advanced artificial intelligence techniques and natural language processing methods to learn how to generate text on its own.

And who wrote those two preceding paragraphs about GPT-3? Well, GPT-3 did.

Here's how; I did a Google search for the term I wanted, copied the intro paragraph and then input that into the tool. GPT-3 then rewrote the paragraphs multiple times, giving me multiple options to choose from. I selected the one I liked and copy/pasted it here. No plagiarism here, sir.

Ok, human Jeff is going to write the rest of this. I think you get the point.

In essence, there is now a "tool" that has read everything that has ever been published on the internet. Everything. And it didn't just read it, it memorized it. Making it an expert on every subject imaginable. The tool also has the ability to write new text. So, combine a deep understanding of any and all topics and the ability to write and you get GPT-3. This tool is now being commercialized at a rapid clip by companies like jasperai.com, surferseo.com, copysmith.ai, etc. The tool itself was created by openai.com and they are the ones licensing it to these companies.

Let's Zoom In

I love new technology. Over the past 15 years at IMA, I have frustrated many an employee or team by introducing a new tool I wanted to test out when we had just figured out the last one (I don't recommend this for high company morale). When I saw GPT-3 was released IMA was one of the first agencies to test it out. We went through roughly 10 - 15 different writing and SEO tools that leverage the technology. Of those, we've settled on one as part of our daily workflow.

Why just one?

At the end of the day, having a robot write your blog headlines and Facebook Ads isn't efficient. You need a human to do the data input after all. And you need that human to be a decent wordsmith or they won't understand if the robot is pumping out good or bad Facebook copy. This means that human wordsmith is spending more time managing the tool than it would take for said human to just write the copy.

These efficiencies could come at scale but we haven't cracked that yet. The other way it could change is if the robots could write this entire blog post with just a couple of data points from me. Yet, so far, that isn't an option yet (editors note: this post was written a few months before ChatGPT was released). There are ways to manipulate the robot to do it, but they are inefficient. I'm sure this will be 100% the opposite in 1-3 years. This technology is moving fast. Is it a good time to get into copywriting as a career? I would say no. You might just end up babysitting a robot.

How Does This Affect You?

GPT-3 and the related tools are going to make your marketing efforts more efficient. We should be able to generate and test more ads for the same time investment. Meaning, the same cost. More testing means better results (as long as the budget allows for it).

This is going to be an exciting time for your business to market itself. Better tools mean better results. The tool I mentioned above, Surfer SEO, just allowed us to organically rank a client #1 for a competitive keyword in just five weeks. We never could have achieved that goal at such speed while solely relying on humans. I know that sounds odd, humans vs robots, but it is our new reality.

I love these types of technological advancements and the results they can achieve for IMA's clients. We will continue to lead the pack in our efforts to find the best and most impactful tools that help you achieve your marketing goals.

At the end of the day, that's what it's all about.

P.S.

Ads have text and images or video, right? Is there a robot that can create artwork? Indeed there is. And it was just released to the public. It's called Dall-E. I'll send you off with an image Dall-E created in less than ten seconds. The prompt I gave it was "a photo of George Clooney as a plumber". Maybe this George Clooney is not quite ready to be in one of your Facebook Ads yet... but it's coming.

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