How AI Is Poised to Create a Truly Democratic and Diverse Future
Over the last 15 years, we’ve increasingly embraced AI with little to no fanfare. We maintain to-do lists with Alexa, use voice or facial recognition to unlock devices, and the list goes on. However, the latest version of chatbots is having groundbreaking impact on both how we use and understand AI.
The swift adoption rate of both versions of GPT illustrates, that the speed in advancement of highly curated, predictive technology will accelerate, resulting in great triumph and despair. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, voiced concern at this rate of acceleration during an interview with ABC News. "The speed of the change is what I worry about the most," he expressed, as it relates to AI generated solutions, including GPT, to disrupt industries and jobs across categories.
Inevitably, as we mature alongside this tech and adapt to the speed of innovations, it will require new considerations and ways of operating to be "successful." A sentiment within the tech community in a recent open letter by the Future of Life Institute - a non-profit for mitigating risks of transformative technology - is rapidly gaining public attention, with over 17,000 signatories as of late March 2023, includes well-known executives such as Steve Wozniak, Apple Co-founder, Evan Sharp, Pinterest Co-Founder, and Elon Musk. In addition to outlining the current and potential risks presented by the accelerated speed of innovation, the letter implores "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4."
AI Is Destined to Revolutionize Marketing
In its current form, neither version of ChatGPT can replace the human factor in marketing. However, it has already proven to be helpful at facilitating content creation, especially marketing copy, by generating multiple versions of production description and advertising material - dynamic messaging with relevant imagery – at scale. With a little creativity and reference examples, prompts can produce rapid, useful outputs that has often surpassed user’s expectations.
These marketing material outputs have sprouted a TikTok movement where creators offer prompt suggestions to generate various outcomes for typical marketing tasks like writing social media copy including actionable headlines and more. With access to a wealth of data, ChatGPT can frequently and dynamically update or edit product descriptions, allowing marketers to focus on other tasks. Since this technology is currently evolving, inherently, limitations are pronounced, leading with accuracy.
While ChatGPT is far from error-free, they and other competitors will continue to improve because of AI’s "training" nature, therefore, if marketers rely on this new tech, they will need to diligently review and validate the content generated to avoid possible misinformation and errors and ensure consistency with brand message and image.
Enter Endless Possibilities
The allure of endless potential highlights the sharpness of the double-edged sword presented by AI. In its most benevolent form, it can revolutionize whole industries. In the academic field, specifically, the learning process could be individually curated and optimized towards optimal learning styles similar to how Khan Academy has incorporated ChatGPT’s natural language and responsive chat to aid problem solving.
On the other hand, it can perpetuate stereotypes and biases which are already prevalent, ironically, in the tech industry, and more specifically, within the context of recruiting decision-makers, where there continues to be a severe lack of diversity at scale. Because this area is responsible for formulating and defining success for all, if it isn’t remedied at the speed AI tech is evolving, the available solutions will continue to perpetuate both conscious and unconscious biases and build its learnings over time based on skewed information or worse, not be able to identify entire demographics.
The severity of this neglect is underscored throughout the documentary Coded Bias, where MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini was unable to develop an innovative concept, not because the tech or computing power was unavailable or inaccessible, but because much of the available tech failed to "detect darker-skinned faces or classify the faces of women." These are entire classifications of humans that are widely represented and are worthy of coded consideration. "Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive, and their risks will be manageable."