Welcome to Artificially Intelligent Marketing, a weekly podcast where we stay on top of the
latest trends, tips, and tools in the world of marketing AI, helping you get the best
results from your marketing efforts.
Now let's join our hosts, Paul Avery and Martin Broadhurst.
Welcome to episode 19 of Artificially Intelligent Marketing.
It's me, Paul Avery, on a solo cast this week because our good friend and fellow co-host
Martin is out and about.
For those of you who are regular listeners of the podcast, you'll know that he's been
out presenting at the AI Marketing Conference, Mike on in Cleveland this week.
He has recorded us a little update from the event, which we'll play for you a bit later
in the episode.
Until then, you'll start with me, I'm afraid, with two main agenda items.
The first one is to cover off all those news items that we didn't get to cover in last
week's episode to bring us up to date after having a couple of weeks off for the summer.
Then we're going to cover this week's news and there are some zingers in there.
So let's jump straight into it.
So first and foremost, Shopify has launched a new AI driven support agent called Sidekick.
In the example video, you can see Sidekick answering general questions about running
a business, providing possible answers for trends within a user Shopify data.
So for example, why might there have been a drop off in sales this quarter?
It also makes it easier to take bulk actions like putting a whole bunch of products on
sale or adding a product line to the company's homepage.
So one can imagine that using Sidekick is going to make managing your Shopify site so
much easier for Shopify users, making it also easier for them to analyze their data perhaps
than ever before and make strategic decisions about their business.
Now according to the Neuron, example Sidekick tasks include things like crafting a blog
post announcing say a new product, discounting certain products automatically, composing
an FAQ about a product and even generating monthly sales reports.
So we can absolutely start to imagine that not only is this going to be powerful for
Shopify users, it's starting to provide a little hint around what AI powered agents
can do when they're connected to your specific data.
So not just using chat bots like ChatGPT or Claude to help you produce content based on
their training data, but really leveraging natural language conversations with chat bots
about your own data.
I think this is also why we're seeing lots of providers that are connected to lots of
your internal data like your CRM or your project management systems are probably poised to
have an even bigger impact on your business than external large language models like ChatGPT
because they're connected to your data.
Shopify's example is a grade one chat spot from HubSpot is really starting to mature as
a tool as well and I think we're going to see a lot more of this over the coming months.
In fact, on this same track, we saw that also Wix, the website and hosting platform has
also brought out an AI driven website builder that integrates with OpenAI's large language
models, so GPT 3.5, GPT 4 and the tool will make it easier for you to build unique high
quality websites just from text prompts.
When you look at the teaser video, it really doesn't look like it provides high quality
outputs.
I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, so I can't speak to it, but again, it's another
example I think of the emerging capabilities of these tools to make business management,
marketing management, marketing production faster and easier by basically asking the
tool in natural language for what you want and then it automatically generating an output.
Some other news that we should cover is how seven leading AONI companies in the US have
all agreed to manage the risks posed by the technology according to the White House.
These companies are Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Salesforce.
The safeguards they're looking to put in place include things like transparency, so
providing clear explanations of how AI systems make decisions, ensuring fairness and non-discrimination
so that these AI systems do not discriminate against individuals or groups, for example,
based on their training data.
Safety and security, so taking those steps to ensure that AI systems are secure and safe
to use.
Human control, so making sure that humans can override AI decisions if necessary.
And then finally, privacy to protect personal information and ensure that AI systems are
used in a way that respects users' privacy.
The companies have committed to developing a system to watermark all forms of content
as well as part of this, so text, images, audio, video, so that users will know when
the technology has been used.
Now no timeline has been given or any technical details on how that will be achieved, but
certainly we can imagine in a world of easier and easier deepfakes during things like presidential
election cycles or other government cycles in other countries, just how important it's
going to be for users to be able to tell what's real and what's not.
And we also live in a world of fake news, where it's going to be easier and easier to
generate fake news about well-known people in the public eye producing videos that to
all intents and purposes look and sound like the real people.
So having those watermarks and that ability to really make it clear what's been generated
by an AI system and what's real could be one of the most important steps that we see in
terms of making it easier for us humans to figure out what's been generated and what
we can actually trust is real.
As another news item, many of you will have seen that Elon Musk has deputed his ex-company,
ex-AI, staff with talent from across the ways, so team members that have worked at places
like Google and OpenAI.
In terms of what they're looking to achieve, it's pretty vague so far, but it seems like
there are plans for them to create, in very common words, a good AGI to help us understand
the true nature of the universe.
And then this week, that saw Twitter soft rebranded as X. And if you're a Twitter user,
you will see that you now have an X logo on your phone, for example, not a little bird.
That has caused a few sticking points as that migration has tried to make being triggered.
Be interesting to see how Elon and the team jump through some of the hurdles that are
being put in front of them as they try and transition to the name of X for the whole
platform including what used to be called Twitter.
In other news, Apple is reportedly working on AI products to rival giants like OpenAI
and Google, with the chatbot project internally known as Apple GPT.
There are no plans to release it yet, but this is an early indication that Apple's
not just going to sit back and watch a number of other large and small companies emerge
in the AI driven natural language prompt driven chatbot world.
They're actually going to try and build their own one too.
We will probably have all seen at this point the Hollywood writers and actors that have
gone on strike.
Lots of issues around this, but AI is certainly a major one of them.
And we touched a little bit on that in last week's episode.
We also saw some interesting marketing AI stuff over the last week or two.
So you may have noticed Jen.ai from Virgin.
So a supposedly AI driven version of Jennifer Lopez, JLo, which went viral.
Although if I'm honest, my take on it is that it was mostly clever marketing and humor and
not much AI.
So I had a bit of a play with it.
And the best I could get it to do in my test is to pronounce names of the people who would
go on the holiday in JLo's voice.
And that wasn't even with lip syncing.
So when Jennifer JLo actually said the custom content, if you like, it was just the audio
you couldn't actually see her face during those sections.
So interesting, but I think it's more a clever marketing play to jump on the AI hype train
than AI that we can get particularly excited about considering what we know these tools
are now capable of.
On that topic, Mini actually launched an AI driven campaign that leaned much more into
AI, but seemed to generate less hype than what I've seen.
So in this campaign, you went onto the Mini website and then it would take a picture of
your face.
And in fact, I think you have it record a short snippet of you speaking into your camera
on say your laptop.
And then it takes your face and your voice and it creates a narrative that it speaks
back to you when it creates a video where you effectively convince yourself to buy a
Mini.
The whole thing's kind of a bit janky and doesn't really work that well.
I mean, certainly it's me, the face and the audio is not bad, but I'm not sure it sounded
exactly like me in my test.
And the lip syncing wasn't brilliant, but this is where we're headed.
And I've seen a number of examples where people are using AI driven lip syncing and audio
generation to influence what people are saying in videos.
And I don't think it'd be very long before this technology really gets a lot better.
I saw an example with the Lex Friedman podcast where he was talking to Mark Zuckerberg and
they'd used the same approach to have them speak in Hindi.
And yes, I think you could see when you looked at their mouths that they didn't quite look
natural, but they look really quite good and it was rather impressive.
So I think this is again, a really clever ploy by Mini to jump on the AI hype train,
but also something for us to think about how those capabilities open as they open up and
become easy to access and the technology becomes even better.
How can we use those in our own marketing activities?
That story was something that quite close to my heart here in the sciences.
So there was a new study published in Nature's Human Behaviour, exploring how AI could aid
and expand scientific discoveries by predicting and generating hypotheses that humans might
not consider.
So in the paper, researchers built models that generated scientifically promising, but
fairly alien, their words, hypotheses that wouldn't be considered by humans.
The AI was also able to predict with over 40% precision, which to be honest is not particularly
precise, but there you go, was able to predict with that level of precision, the actual people
who would make discovery based on their experiences and relationships.
That's quite interesting.
The overall, the study suggests AI could turbocharge our scientific explorations by helping us make
faster discoveries and even coming up with cool, interesting avenues of exploration that
humans wouldn't naturally think of.
This reminds me of a story that we covered here on the podcast previously, where BeatMine
researchers created AlphaDev to improve computer information processing.
And in this case, the system suggested improvements to the data management that sped up computing
and data movement that humans just wouldn't have thought of.
So I think it's interesting how we're starting to see the emergence of AI tools that can
solve problems in a way that's different from how humans would solve problems because
of the way that these AIs don't quite think like we do, which is pretty interesting.
Another paper, scientific paper this time, is in Science, where some research was published
where writers who chose to use ChatGPT took 40% less time on average to complete their
task and produce work that assessors felt scored 18% higher in quality than the participants
who didn't use it.
So further data here suggesting that you can use tools like ChatGPT if you're in content
production to reduce the amount of time that you need to spend on production and slightly
improve the quality.
I do think this is going to vary a lot depending on who the original writer is and who the
users of these tools are.
Last bit of old news before we get into the new news is that the Mayo Clinic is using
Google's AI ChatPort as part of providing healthcare.
So the Mayo Clinic has been using MedPalm 2 in hospital training since April 2023, so
the last few months.
It's performed comparably to doctors in metrics such as evidence of reasoning, consensus
supported answers and comprehensive accuracy.
According to Google's Senior Research Director Greg Corrado, MedPalm 2 is still in its early
stages and has the potential to expand the beneficial roles of AI in healthcare greatly.
So now that you're all caught up on the older news, now let's jump into this week's
news.
So what do we see this week?
Well, Stability AI released SDXL 1.0 to rival Mid Journey in image generation.
So this is quite an interesting one because the new open model, SDXL 1.0, is a significant
advancement on some of Stability AI's previous image generation models and it can generate
high quality images in any art style, including photorealism and has an improved ability to
interpret language and distinguish between similar terms with different meanings.
It's got a total parameter count of 10.1 billion, making it the largest open image
model to date.
The quality of the image is actually really quite good.
I've been impressed in some of my trials with it.
So it's going to be interesting to see how people use this model, both by accessing tools
like ClipDrop that we'll talk about in a moment, but also because it's open source,
how can they leverage it in their own products?
Reportedly, SDXL 1.0 can actually write readable text.
Now this would be a huge step forward for marketers because for many of you who've played
with Mid Journey or other image generation tools, you'll have noticed that they absolutely
suck at text.
Supposedly, this new model, SDXL, is better, but in my test, if I'm honest, the results
were extremely mixed.
I would say on average, better at producing text.
So I did a test where I asked it to create a billboard with text on it, no images, just
text.
It was like I had to run the generation multiple times and the results were really mixed, nowhere
near production quality.
I've also seen on Twitter people talking about this saying you can get decent text out of
it, but it's very iterative.
You've got to be patient and you've got to find different ways to prompt it and run multiple
generations to get what you want.
Now if you want to have a play with this, you can.
Just visit clippdrop.co, which is a stability AI product with lots of really interesting
image, generation and manipulation tools where you can now generate images using the new
SDXL 1.0 model.
In other news this week, Rewind has released a new personalized AI app for iPhone to expand
upon its Mac app.
So for those of you that haven't heard of this, Rewind is an AI driven app that functions
as a search engine for users' personal digital interactions.
So what it basically does is it allows users to record, store and rewind their work by
recording anything they've seen, said or heard when they've been using, in this case their
iPhone or their Mac and making all that info searchable.
It's powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 and it kind of acts like a personal AI time traveler to
remind you of certain things that you might have been doing a couple of weeks ago that
you can't remember.
You can just ask the tool and because it's indexed what you've been up to, it can give
you some info about what you've been doing.
Now I haven't tried this yet because as far as I know, there's no way to easily customize
what it pays attention to and what it doesn't.
So it feels a bit like a security risk to me.
And also I'm not sure I want at all monitoring absolutely everything that I do on my Mac.
That seems that I can see the benefits, but this is feel like you have to give up quite
a lot of your own privacy to be able to access that.
I'm not quite ready to do that.
By definition for these AI assistants to help us to the max, we're going to have to at some
point accept that they're going to be monitoring everything we're doing.
In fairness, I'm sure Facebook and other tools that have got access to my Mac are doing that
right now, but it may take a bit of a mental shift before most of us are ready to provide
that level of access to these tools in order to get the most benefits.
Next news item here is that Amazon have announced the launch of agents for Bedrock at the AWS
summit in New York this week.
So as described in tech crunch, which is where we read about this, Bedrock is Amazon platform
for building generative AI powered apps using pre-tenant trained models from a bunch of
companies, including Amazon, but also others.
The new feature agents allows customers of Amazon AWS to create conversational agents
that can deliver personalized up to date answers based on the company's own proprietary data.
So that's quite an interesting one.
I know a number of companies out there are really looking at how do we create internal
facing and external facing natural language chat bots for our teams and customers that
are based on our own data.
And here Bedrock agents is looking to enable that.
So a tool like this could be used to create custom service chat bots that can process
orders, tapping into things like internal information about stock levels, et cetera,
to customize each order.
Bedrock agents can also manage and perform tasks by making API calls to company systems.
So really being able to have the agent embed in lots of different information repositories
across your business.
So again, I think this is going to be really, really interesting to see how this plays out
in the future.
On a similar note to this, Cohere, which is another large language model developing company,
has announced Coral, which is a knowledge assistant that's designed to enhance the productivity
of teams within enterprise businesses.
So again, this is another chat bot based tool, a large language model that can tap into the
data within your organization.
Coral can find answers across documents and provide responses back with citations, ensuring
the information provided is verifiable and mitigating against false information.
So it does this not just by looking at your company's own data, but also external data
and things on the web, as far as I understand.
Coral can be customized for different teams within your organization, such as finance,
support, marketing, sales, and it can be made even more powerful by connecting it to data
sources to augment its knowledge base.
And at the moment, there are over 100 integrations across CRMs, project management tools, databases,
et cetera.
In terms of data security and privacy, Coral operates within the user's own server secure
cloud, whether that's through cloud partners or virtual private clouds.
The data used by Coral is never sent to Cohere, ensuring it remains within the user's environment.
Again, this is going to be absolutely critical because a lot of enterprise businesses effectively
have banned their staff from using tools like ChatGPT because they don't want any of their
sensitive internal or customer information making it into the hands of OpenAI because
it's just not clear how OpenAI and other providers of these large language models use the data
that we put into them.
So what in effect, what Cohere is doing here is saying, here's a large language model,
a chatbot for you to use like ChatGPT that can access all of your company's information,
making it really customized and useful for your business.
And by the way, it's super secure because we don't ever get to see what you're basically
doing with your own information.
So I think this could make this very, very attractive to large enterprises and even small
businesses over time, to be honest.
And we should expect to see many other players in this space follow suit.
And in fact, this tool is likely to compete with the likes of Microsoft Copilot and Bard
in terms of natural language chatbots that help you with your work, but do so in a customized
way that's super relevant to your business because they're plugged into all your other
docs and data and stuff like that.
So it is worth noting, we do expect this to come from Microsoft and Google over the next,
we don't know, one, two, five, six, 12 months.
But when we see companies like Cohere moving quite quickly with tools like Coral, expect
it to nudge the Microsofts and the Googles perhaps into faster action.
We did talk last week about how the pricing for Microsoft Copilot for Office 365 has already
been talked about, maybe $30 per user per month.
So maybe that is an early sign that we can expect to see Microsoft's tool coming soon.
In other news, TrackTBT is now available on Android in a number of countries as an app.
And this includes the US and UK.
So I've been able to have a little play, which is great.
It was already available on iPhone, but now you can get it on Android.
What I really love about the tool versus using it on, say, your desktop computer is that
you can dictate your prompt into the app because it has a microphone button.
And it's actually worked really well in my hands.
I think it's better than the dictation app on my keyboard on my phone, for example.
When I installed it, I did see a very interesting disclaimer that specifically warns you not
to share sensitive info as chats may be reviewed by OpenAI's trainers to improve the systems.
It's not clear if this is true even when the chat history is turned off, which was previously
believed to opt you out of having your inputs used by OpenAI.
But the way that this technical warning works is actually a little bit confusing and makes
me wonder that even with chat history off, they are still paying quite a lot of attention
to the information that we send to them.
So I think that's very much worth keeping in mind.
Next news item is the emergence of a generative AI tool on the dark web called Fraud GPT that
offers capabilities to cybercriminals.
So this is a bit of a public service announcement for all of us because it's on the dark web,
it's being positioned as an all-in-one solution with features including writing malicious
code, creating phishing emails, and finding leaks and vulnerabilities.
Sadly, the tool has already got over 3,000 confirmed sales and reviews.
And I think the emergence of cybercrime AI tools like Fraud GPT is probably just the
beginning.
And it's going to make the ability of scammers when they create some phishing emails, et
cetera, to make them look even more realistic than before and at a larger scale because
they'll be automatable in a way that maybe hasn't been possible.
So I think the take home here is that we all need to pay even closer attention to the emails
and messages that we get as the fakes are going to get even more impressive when powered
by the likes of large language models, says Amit to keep in mind.
Next news item is 11 Labs.
They've released a bunch of new voices.
So they were created in collaboration with industry professionals and now they can offer
a wider range of delivery styles, accents, and improved audio quality.
So this is going to provide even more options for those of you who've been exploring using
11 Labs and synthetic voices in your content.
And it's going to allow users to choose from an even broader selection of voices to meet
their needs.
And this even includes voices that can change their delivery.
So from whispering through to basically screaming.
So we can really see that the synthetic voice market is really evolving quickly to meet
a wide range of human spoken audio needs.
And the nuances of performance are improving all the time.
So being able to create audio books at scale, even for people who are self publishing or
for businesses, you can expect that to be made even easier, but even more realistic
by tools like this.
And who knows even this podcast like I'm doing now, which I promise is a real podcast and
I'm the real human speaking here, but how long until you can synthesize my voice and
then deliver probably far more impressive performance than mine using tools like those
released by 11 Labs remains to be seen.
Next is Runway's Gen 2 image to video has been released and it's pretty cool.
Now regular listeners to the podcast will know that we've talked a fair bit about Runway
and their Gen 1 and Gen 2 text to video tools, that we've played with mixed results.
I've seen some people do some really cool stuff on social media, but it felt like the
sort of stuff that probably took ages to put together because it's so iterative trying
to get half decent videos out of these things.
But I think where the image to video tool is a bit of a game changer is it's so much
better than a text prompt for getting an animated thing that you want.
And I've seen people creating really awesome mid-journey images and then pushing those
into Gen 2 and getting some really impressive results.
My own tests with this have been a bit of a mix.
I've noticed that you have to iterate quite a lot, change your prompt a bit to get something
that you want.
And I've had some videos that just didn't work at all and others that actually were
quite impressive.
In fact, I animated the cover for Artificially Intelligent Marketing and got really quite
an interesting psychedelic animation of it.
It's impressive to me how good the model is at understanding all the sort of elements
of the image that you put in as the prompt and finding natural ways to animate it that
I think an animator might also consider.
So go and have a play with this over at Runway.
You can set up a free account and have a few goes with Gen 2 before you need to pay.
I think these tools are really getting even better.
Again, is this quite production quality?
Not for a brand, I don't think.
The videos that you can find on the Twittersphere are very interesting and some of them are
really quite good, but not, but they still have that kind of weird style that we're seeing
from these video generators, but they're getting there.
So definitely something to keep an eye on.
And then the last story this week is Stability AI has released two new open source large
language models, FreeWheelie 1 and FreeWheelie 2.
These models excel in reasoning and understanding linguistic subtleties and they've been validated
through various benchmarks.
Despite being trained on a smaller dataset compared to previous models, the FreeWheelie
models demonstrate exceptional performance with FreeWheelie 2 even outperforming GPT-4
in some areas and GPT-3 in most.
The release of these models comes off the back of MetaSlammer 2 knowledge?
Knowledge?
Release?
The release of these models comes off the back of MetaSlammer 2, news that we mentioned
last week.
And it's a really big win for the open source community and it's going to probably drive
even faster developments in the AI space as developers of products and tools can get access
to much more moldable, high quality large language models that they can mold and change
and use in ways that's just not possible with some of the closed models like ChatGPT-4 and
other models from businesses like Anthropic.
So again, I think we're going to see the emergence of some really cool tools here off the back
of this that are going to have great power and hopefully provide us as marketers with
even more tools for us to use in our businesses.
So with that, that's the summary of this week's news.
Next week, Martin and I will be back on this as normal.
And what I'm going to do now is hand over to Martin to give us that update from what
looked like a really fascinating conference at MECON this week.
Hi, Paul, and hello listeners.
This is Martin coming to you all the way from Cleveland, Ohio, where I've been at the MECON
Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute's conference, learning and networking with some
of the best and brightest minds in marketing and AI.
It's been an eye-opening event, some really interesting discussions, broad ranging everything
from what's the state of AI adoption to how can service providers such as marketing agencies
change their proposition and the way that they deliver their services to clients through
to really practical sessions looking at how you can write better and more effective plumps
and also covering some really important topics like how do we use AI ethically and responsibly.
There were some fantastic speakers.
They really did pull together some of the brightest and the best.
So we had the head of marketing, Jasper, Megan Keeney-Anderson, my favorite presenter, Cassie
Kozakov, who's the chief decision scientist from Google.
She was keynoting today.
There was a fantastic broad ranging fireside chat between Paul Rateser, who is the CEO
of the Marketing AI Institute, and he sat down with Ethan Molyk, who's a professor of
innovation and entrepreneurship at Wharton University.
Their conversation was truly eye-opening.
Ethan Molyk, he's got some fantastic insights into where this technology is heading.
He's clearly well-networked in terms of the people building the AI systems as it is.
He is of the opinion that this technology is going to see exponential growth in terms
of capabilities and that we really need to sit up and pay attention because people are
really underestimating the speed at which the development is going to come and the implications
that we will all face.
Broadly speaking, he was optimistic, but there was no doubt that he thinks that people's
jobs are going to be impacted and that we should get using these tools now to get a
bit of a head start.
There was reference to an interesting concept that he came up with in one of his blogs recently,
which was this idea of the button.
He said that when the button exists, which is to say that when things like Microsoft
Copilot have that little assistant at the side where you can just press a button and
it will create the thing, and it will create something super, super quick.
The example he gave was he is asked regularly to write a recommendation letter for a student.
It might be someone going for a job and they've written to him as he was their professor and
said, would you write me a recommendation letter?
He says he does this regularly for his ex-students and each one will typically take half an hour
to 45 minutes for him to write, but they've written from him personally.
Now the other day he created a similar, well he wrote one of these using ChatGPT and it
took him seconds.
Now the actual letter was still guided by him, he gave him the context so that it was
genuine but it didn't have the same human, what's the word, love, want, effort.
But the value to the end user, to the customer, in this case the person applying for the job
is the same and if it helps them get the job, who cares that it took five seconds rather
than 45 minutes.
But he gives the example of this in the workplace, when you can just push a button and get a
thing done, what does that do to the value of work and the work that we put together?
If we're writing reports and we can just hit the button, do we become lazy, does this devalue
work that might require human input?
And there was no definitive answer there, it was just an interesting thought experiment.
There was a great session on prompt engineering from Jim Stern who does a lot of work on digital
marketing analytics, he's published many books on the topic but yeah he gave some great advice
on prompt design and how you can build frameworks and yeah I think one of the big things that
he, big takeaways for me with what he said was that actually we're at the very start
of all of this, so there's no right or wrong answer.
If you can find something that works, great, share that knowledge, people are always finding
new ways.
Now he gave some general pointers, things that anyone listening to this podcast probably
knows already such as the more context you put in the front the better output you get,
if you give the AI a persona it's less likely to go kind of wandering off and giving you
horrible responses or something like that, it kind of stays on script.
But yeah by and large he was giving some good practical uses or practical examples of how
you can prompt better.
Now I could talk about various other talks and things all day, there's so much to cover
over the next few weeks, I'm hoping to get some interviews lined up with some of the
people that I've met here, it's a great network of people and some great vendors and looking
forward to bringing them into the podcast and introducing them to the artificially intelligent
marketing community.
So with that I will say farewell, it's half past five on a Friday, it's time for me to
go to a Cleveland bar and drink a nice hazy beer.
Thank you for listening to Artificially Intelligent Marketing.
To stay on top of the latest trends, tips and tools in the world of marketing AI, be
sure to subscribe.
We look forward to seeing you again next week.