To Infinity and Beyond?
The rise and development of AI tools.
We recently attended an Agency Hackers event called The Robots are Coming. The event set out to tackle how agencies like ourselves can harness the exponential rise and development of AI tools.
It may have been a day trip to Shoreditch, but the real journey was in mental expansion. With over 5,000 AI tools and counting, and almost no corner of business unaffected, it was a journey that needed to happen right now. Personally, OpenAI first appeared in my life when I made the mistake of introducing my teenagers to ChatGPT. Since then, they have been telling me what a useful tool it is, to the point we jokingly refer to it as CheatGPT!
But professionally, we’re challenged with retaining the joy and craft of the creative process – the strategic thinking and judgment and the ability to curate ideas – all of the things it can take a lifetime to finesse. From a creative point of view, we’ll be wrestling with how to
balance machine-learning and the human brain for a long time to come.
“From a creative point of view, we’ll be wrestling with how to balance machine-learning and the human brain for a long time to come.”
What about the positives? Dan from Brave Bison neatly summarised AI as being a creative wingman – it has a place at the table and may show up the odd surprise – because it doesn’t ‘think’ in the same way as we do.
From a wider business context, we only scratched the surface of other applications for AI. Vincent from Get Inference showed that for now AI is mainly used at the top of a very long funnel. But, we’ll quickly see dramatic development beyond language and into vision and prediction, clustering and personalisation. AI tools will have a seat at some top tables when able to make recommendations and provide a form of vision beyond our own horizons.
The whole point of OpenAI is that it is indeed open and some tools are free to use which is a great leveller, however, those who master the tools will gain huge advantages. We’re certainly exploring and experimenting, like most people in the agency sector. This potential threat has seemingly presented one of the biggest opportunities in our working lives, so be it to infinity or beyond…