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AI is Like Superman’s Powers
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its current form, is like Superman’s powers. It can be used for good or evil. In this article, I’ll leverage my 30-plus years of experience in product marketing to tell you how I think artificial intelligence is changing the landscape for product marketing and marketing in general.
First, let’s start with how AI can be used for good.
Good: A Cure for Writer’s Block
Did you ever sit down and try to write something, but you just couldn’t get the idea down on paper? Moreover, have you ever sat down and had no idea what to write? This is where AI can help the average product marketer.
What does a product marketer do generally? We write. We write marketing requirements documents, messaging documents, and press releases. Our ability to put words and sentences together is critical to our ability to pay our mortgages.
The AI chatbots I’ve seen are never at a loss for words. Why? Because they’ve consumed trillions of words to form the parameters of their models. If there’s one thing they can do, it’s essentially copy what other people have done. Using AI means you never have to deal with writer’s block again. You may not get great text from it, but it will at least be average because its answers are the average of all of the text it has consumed.
Good: A Productivity Booster
For certain tasks like writing and programming, one of the greatest benefits of AI is that it’s a productivity booster. It boosts productivity in two ways. First, it can generate low-value text that you would have to spend time typing in. Second, it can help you get past roadblocks that you might have encountered. As I’ve suggested in other places, one of the areas most impacted by AI will be programmers, but in some positive ways. It enables the generation of much more code, increasing productivity.
But there are many additional good ways that AI will impact product marketers. As product marketers, there are times when we generate staggering texts of incredible brilliance, and then there’s the rest of the time when we’re merely filling space. This will allow us to dispense with the latter and focus on the former.
Good: Eliminate Meaningless Tasks
In addition to generating text, AI can help us eliminate meaningless tasks, or at least tasks that are often too difficult for their own good. Consider the process of creating Search advertising in Google Ads. This can sometimes be maddeningly difficult because of the haiku-like nature of the task you are charged with doing before you can get your ads published. You have to come up with 15 30-character headlines for 90-character descriptions, and so on. Generating this once you have your basic keywords in place is now made quite easy through the intervention of AI.
Now, let’s look at how artificial intelligence can be used for evil.
Evil: Average At Best
AI hallucinations, or even imperfections, are a real thing. When you approach AI, it is important to have a deep and abiding suspicion. One of my favorite Russian sayings is “Trust but verify.” I like this saying because it’s inherently contradictory. If you trust it, why would you need to verify it? If you need to verify it, then inherently you don’t trust it. I think it tells us something about the Russian psyche. But I digress.
As of this writing, AI is imperfect, sometimes grossly so. As a result, you can ask it to write something and it will deliver seemingly beautiful text. But in reality, the text has fundamental flaws and potentially is based on some incorrect assumptions. It may even hallucinate whole sets of facts. I’ve seen this myself; I’m sure you have, too.
I noted above that AI can be a good productivity booster, and this is true. But I’ve caught people on my team needing to be so productive that they generated entire articles from AI. It’s well known that you often can catch ChatGPT-generated text merely by looking for the em dash. (For the record, IMO Gemini does seem to do a better job in this regard.) But it’s important to remember that you will never get great text out of AI. All have been trained to build a statistical model of how language flows. And because of the law of large numbers, the text will only be the average of the text that it was trained on. Think about that: it will only generate average text.
Evil: Slop
A corollary to the fact that AI will generate average text is the fact that it sometimes has trouble regurgitating things that we were familiar with in the real world. Consider all those AI-generated images of people with six fingers. And since most of what it generates is average and not terribly inspired, that leads to the generation of slop: mass amounts of mediocre information of dubious quality. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards.
Evil: Taking Advantage of Gullibility
AI is improving fast. As of this writing, it is able to generate realistic-looking images from a complex enough prompt. And this presents a problem. In the book Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson, he presents a world where the internet has failed because no information on it is trustworthy. It is called the Miasma, as in an influence or atmosphere that tends to deplete or corrupt. I fear we may be close to this. The images that AI can generate are so good that there’s no limit to the number of believable fake images that can be published. You only need to look at the Reddit subreddit isThisAI to see images where it is impossible to tell if it’s AI-generated or not.
Because the fakes are getting better, and because the gullibility of internet users is constant, I’m deeply worried about what this does to society.
Superman Vs. Bizarro
The contrast between Superman and his evil arch-nemesis Bizarro typifies the struggle that we will have with AI. Like any new technology, AI can be used for good or evil. Nuclear technology can be used for bombs, as well as for generating clean power. We must remain on guard and carry with us a healthy skepticism. In essence, we must trust and verify.
If you want to harness AI’s productivity benefits while avoiding the pitfalls of mediocre content and mistrust, contact us at Aventi Group to strengthen your product marketing and go-to-market execution.
