AI Landscape
Generative AI tools present exciting opportunities for those working in communications and marketing, offering innovative solutions to enhance our strategies and achieve greater success. These tools can assist in various aspects of our work, including content creation, data analysis, customer engagement, and more. By harnessing the power of AI, we can streamline our processes, gain deeper insights into audience behavior and deliver more personalized and effective communications to our target audiences. Embracing AI in our work will enable us to adapt to the rapidly evolving landscape of communications and marketing.
Things to Keep in Mind
AI tools offer numerous opportunities for communications and marketing professionals, but it's essential to be aware of certain concerns and considerations when incorporating them into our work. Here are some of the key points to keep in mind:
- Data Privacy and Ethics: There is a need to handle all data with the utmost care. Ensure that your AI solutions adhere to data protection regulations, maintain transparency in data usage and follow ethical guidelines to respect user privacy.
- Bias and Fairness: AI systems can inherit biases from the data they are trained on. It's crucial to be vigilant about potential biases in AI-generated content or decision-making processes to avoid unintended discrimination or misrepresentation.
- Quality Control: While AI can automate many tasks, human oversight is still crucial. Always review and edit AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with the brand's voice, values and quality standards.
- Over-Reliance on AI: AI tools are supportive but should not replace human creativity, strategic thinking and intuition. It's important to strike a balance and use AI as a tool to augment, not replace, human expertise.
- Flexibility and Adaptability: AI tools and technologies are continually evolving. Stay adaptable and be prepared to adjust strategies as new AI innovations emerge.
- User Agreements and Terms of Service: It’s important to be aware of specific tools’ terms of service and user agreements prior to their use. This clarifies how generated output can be used and helps avoid potential violation of the user agreement. In some cases, this will mean a paid version of a tool is necessary to obtain the user rights necessary.
By being mindful of these considerations and taking appropriate measures, communications and marketing professionals can harness the power of AI tools while mitigating potential risks.
Useful Terminology
- Large Language Model (LLM): A large language model is a sophisticated computer program that can understand and generate human-like text. It's trained on vast amounts of written language to assist with tasks like answering questions, writing content or having conversations with people. Examples of LLMs include GPT-3.5, GPT-4 and LAMDA.
- ChatGPT: ChatGPT is a chatbot interface for the GPT LLM.
Disclaimers
Tools such as ChatGPT have limitations. For one, GPT-3.5 was trained on data available prior to September 2021 and GPT-4 was released in March 2023, with an updated knowledge base extending to September 2023. ChatGPT cannot access the internet to report on live events.
LLM models also inherit biases from the datasets on which they were trained. In addition, they will tend to fill in information gaps with information that may not be accurate, and they don’t always get math correct. This means the tools can’t be relied upon to generate information that doesn’t have inaccuracies. When using the tools, take that into consideration and don't assume the information they present is entirely accurate. Users also need to consider audience expectations and ethics regarding content creation and presentation using AI tools.
Use caution when asking ChatGPT to do something a person doesn’t understand or can’t verify. A person who doesn’t have development skills may not know the risks of generating code, for example. Or someone who isn’t familiar with SEO may not know the output will not make SEO better.
AI is a fast-moving, fast-changing area of technology. Government officials are still determining how best to regulate the technology. The European Union is working on regulations for use. An executive order was issued by President Biden regarding platform testing with implications on use by federal employees in October 2023, and future legislation is possible.
MSU will continue to monitor developments and will update recommendations, as necessary.