There’s a meme going around using a scene from Wolf of Wall Street. Leonardo DiCaprio gives some poor schlump the famous challenge to, “Sell me this pen.”
And the response is, “It’s powered by AI”
Since ChatGPT rolled out in the last quarter of 2022, Artificial Intelligence has become the incantation used by just about anybody trying to sell you just about anything without ever explaining how it works. So before you bet your budget (or your job) on AI marketing software, make sure you know what’s actually in the box.
Most AI systems use what’s called a large language model (LLM), created by scraping up billions of articles, posts, academic papers and whatever other content it can find from all over the Internet. The copyright issues of this aside, the resulting database creates a catalog of source material that allows the LLM to recognize what words and phrases are most likely to follow each word or phrase in the prompt. Essentially it’s pattern recognition software, which done at scale may be pretty impressive, but it’s not likely to replace original thought because the engine is not really doing any thinking. It’s filling in the blanks.
I saw an example of this a few days ago in an unsolicited email promoting a new business-to-business marketing tool that is – wait for it – powered by AI. If the pitch I received is an example of how the system would work for my clients, it may need another minute or ten in the oven.
Apparently using content scraped from the St. Gregory website, my LinkedIn and other social media profiles, and from various news articles in which I’ve been mentioned, the email constructed an elaborate soft-pitch opening congratulating me for various successes (some pretty obscure in hindsight), before inviting me to reminisce with the supposed author about my glory days in college.
It was pretty powerful stuff. I got a little misty-eyed recalling all the special events, especially the homecoming parade … at a university that has neither a homecoming parade nor a marching band, let alone a homecoming game or even a football team.
These may seem minor errors in the scheme of things, but they illustrate a very important point about the powered-by-AI hype: artificial intelligence in real-world marketing applications is nowhere near ready for the big game. You will still need original ideas. You’ll also still need to verify your audience, customize your content and importantly fact-check the output.
All that means the Mechanical Turk still doesn’t really work without the person inside. Y’know, your marketing team.
And that’s not what was on the label.
