- All AI is doing is laying down words on a page.
There's a lot more to writing
than just laying down words on a page.
(soft music)
The only thing that's ever really held our ideas back
is our ability to convey them well and at scale.
You know, we're always dogged by deadlines.
We take shortcuts.
We ruin our own quality because we don't have enough time.
This can remove all of that.
- And then hit generate.
Now Jasper takes those inputs
and gives you an output that's ready to use.
- This can get out ideas
that have never been created before.
I think that's really powerful.
We just have a responsibility in that as well.
What I think all of those comparisons of like,
oh, AI versus humans, or this tool writes better than you,
I think those are all false.
I think that what we need to do
is to equip writers with these tools
just in the same way that a designer uses Photoshop
or a photographer uses a digital camera.
These are tools that really only come to life
when they're in a true content strategist's hands, right?
AI doesn't become transformational until you do as a writer.
And so I think that they're just misguided.
And I think it comes from a, you know,
a classic place, right?
Everybody's always looking for a faster, easier,
quicker way to get things done,
and this will help you move faster for sure,
but it's just not gonna be a one-for-one replacement
for a writer and it shouldn't be.
Okay, so we now all have this technology at our fingertips
and the next question that marketing leaders
are going to have to figure out is
how do you really ingrain this as part of your strategy?
How do you make sure it's not just a shortcut
that your team uses
and that there's actual thought put into it?
So there's a few things that I'd recommend to start.
The first is, I'd invest
in training your team on AI literacy.
Make sure they understand how AI works.
Make sure they understand its biases, its limitations.
Make sure they're looking out
for those things in their content.
Secondly, set some standards
about how you are going to use AI on your teams,
when you use it, in what manner,
what the editing process looks like.
And just be really clear with your team
that this is an okay tool to use and that there's a good
and a bad way to use it across your marketing.
I think it's really important to remember
that AI shouldn't be just a copy
and paste tool for your marketing team.
So many companies rely on Google
for organic distribution of their content
and they've come out really clearly and said,
"Look, we are against junk content."
If you are just copying
and pasting from an automation tool,
or you're hiring a hundred freelancers to just churn
out content without any substance in it, you know,
that's not gonna rank well.
That's not gonna do well in distribution.
Now good content, AI-assisted or not,
will break through and will rise to the top.
I think that the playing field has gotten a lot broader now
where more people can have the capacity
to create the kinda content that some
of the bigger shops have been able to do now.
And so now actually really good writing,
really good design, really good, you know,
video production, that's at a premium.
So I actually think that, you know,
maybe this is idealistic, but I think
that it places an even greater importance
on the creatives in your staff.
Okay, so I think that the thing
that people don't really know about AI
is actually how it works, right?
I think a lot of times people see this as a tool,
and it's, the learning curve is so small, right?
You can get in there, ask a question,
and paragraphs will be written, or, you know,
blocks of code will be written for you.
And that's enough
for so many people where they're just like,
I kinda don't care how it works.
I just care that it works
and that it helped me get through this blog post faster.
But I think that for us to really sort of, you know,
make the most of this tool and also stave off
some of the flaws and weak points in it,
we really do have to drastically
increase the literacy when it comes
to our understanding of how AI works.
AI consumes, generative AI in particular,
because AI is vast, right?
Generative AI is actually just a sliver of it,
but it's the one that everyone
has been captivated by recently.
So generative AI works by consuming just enormous amounts
of content or code or, you know, the internet itself
and learning through patterns of how that,
you know, content gets laid out, right?
So it reads everything and through that,
it learns sort of natural language
and what a logical next word in a sentence could be.
And because of this, it's able to do a lot
of things, you know, without plagiarism,
without sort of ripping lines from the internet.
It's truly just naturally laying down
word after word based on that learning.
But there's a couple of flaws with that.
For starters, most of this,
even though it's an enormous amount of source material,
it's still a confined amount of source material.
And anytime you're sort of pulling
from source material that is capped,
you are inherently having a system
that is less representative.
You're having a system of source material
that has some flaws and some inaccuracies in it, right?
And so it's amazing because it's like,
for as massive as we feel like the source materials
are here, they are still kinda limited.
But it's enough to get AI to a place where
it sounds natural when it produces a sentence, for example.
Most AI is trained off of content
that is a couple years old, too.
So if you ask what Taylor Swift's most recent album is,
it might say an album from a couple of years ago.
Most AI is, you know, pulled from sets
that, you know, are gonna,
they're gonna necessarily sorta pull
in all the biases that humans have in their own writing.
We're sort of training our own biases into the system.
So all of this is to say
that it's an incredibly powerful tool
trained in an enormous amount of content,
but you still need to edit
and you still need to have that human judgment
about what is right and what is representative
and what your audience cares about in your writing.
And that's why I say it truly needs to be a partnership.
For as magical as this whole thing is,
it's still limited and it will be for,
I think, forever without that human judgment.
Over the course of history, there have been a number
of these kind of expansion events that have really
shifted the way that we communicate with customers,
the way that we create as professionals.
I think the biggest and most far-reaching one
is the internet itself, right?
And I think that this is sort of
on that scale of something that is going to, you know,
it's kinda been coming for a while and it just accelerated.
And in a matter of a few years' time,
almost everything that we do will be different
as a result of this technology.
With any kinda transformational technology,
there are ways that it has really advanced society
and really advanced business.
And there are ways that it's been used to just put a bunch
of junk out on the internet or, at best and at worst,
you know, do harmful things, right?
And so I think that we actually
have a tremendous responsibility
to invest more in things like, you know,
finding original story ideas, invest more in editing,
invest more in teaching our teams AI literacy
and bias, and, you know, inclusivity in your content.
Like now is the time to lean into that stuff
so that we can also reap the benefits
of this technology at its best.
And if we don't do that, I think we fail the technology.
I think we fail our companies, and I think we fail,
you know, the larger industry society as a whole.
I'm a writer.
People are like, "Well, you know, why would you go
"write work for a generative AI company
"that's replacing writers, quote, unquote?"
And the answer is that like, you know,
this is here and we need to steer it
in the right direction to reach its potential.
I hope that we as creators and marketers
and business leaders will take the reins of this technology
and bend the arc of its use towards something positive.
- I can't find this client info.
- Have you heard of HubSpot?
HubSpot is a CRM platform
so it shares its data across every application.
Every team can stay aligned.
No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.
HubSpot, grow better.
(upbeat music)