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.
Hello everybody, welcome to Artificially Intelligent Marketing, your favorite podcast for everything
AI and marketing, where myself and my good friend Martin Broadhurst go through all of
the things that happened in AI and marketing for the week, look at some tools of the week
and just any other interesting information that we think you might find interesting to
get on top of.
How are you today, Martin?
Well after the deluge of AI announcements over the past few weeks, I managed to actually
read something that wasn't AI related.
I managed to open a newspaper and look at the sports stories and some stuff like that.
Apparently there's a world out there that isn't AI related.
And you know when you read those stories, it's just Derby County bashing, isn't it?
So is that really what you need more of that in your life?
Yeah, for the most part it is that.
It was yet another bleak weekend.
We lost to Peterborough.
That was terrible.
Game of two halves, we were dominating in the first half but didn't score.
So you know, that's football for you.
That's also sort of what happened to Google in the AI race.
Also a bleak weekend, a bleak end.
I like the concept of that.
That must be what it's like to be a Derby fan.
Anyway, enough nonsense.
Cool, cool.
Well, let's get straight into it.
What are we going to talk about today?
We're going to talk about tech experts calling for a six month AI hiatus.
We're going to talk about how Levi's has used AI generated models for some really cool stuff.
Brian's going to take us through.
We're going to talk about Bing has announced how it's going to try and weave advertising
into its chat platform, which is like ChatGPT.
We're going to look at some news that came out of the UK government about it's a white
paper about how they're going to use AI to drive turbocharged growth.
And we're going to look at some tweets that came out from one of the co-founders of HubSpot,
Brian Halligan about AI and the future of content marketing.
And then of course, we're going to have our tool of the week, which this week is going
to be Go Charlie.
Right.
Let's get into story one.
So yes, this open letter where a number of influential figures such as Elon Musk, Steve
Wozniak and Andrew Yang have demanded a temporary hold of at least six months on AI system training
and deployment.
They contend that AI's increasing power is not matched by adequate safety measures, government
regulations and strategies to address AI's far reaching societal effects.
Here is a quote from the letter.
Recent months have seen AI labs are locked in an out of control race to develop and deploy
ever more powerful digital minds that no one, not even their creators, can understand, predict
or reliably control.
So this is a very interesting thing to see happen.
I've got to be honest Brian, with my cynical hat on, I see that some of the most well known
signage of this letter are competitors to open AI and that this could just be a guarded
attempt to say, open AI, is there any chance you could just stop for six months while the
rest of us catch up?
What are your thoughts?
Absolutely.
The first thought that came to my mind, first of all, I think it's a, I get the concerns,
right?
There is, there are legitimate concerns and I'm sure we'll go into those, but the idea
that we're going to go stop that for six months is, well frankly, crazy.
Take it away from the corporate competition, but look at the kind of geopolitical landscape,
right?
So who is developing AI tech?
China, Russia, EU?
What?
We're just supposed to imagine that American companies are going to cede their position
to overseas organizations.
It's a nonsense.
I understand why a group of hyper-official figures are going to say, hey, look, this
is something that we need to have a real discussion about because this tech is, there's potential
for it to run away from us.
But the idea of a, hey, let's just, let's let everyone slow down, start, take a breather,
six months, rest, pause, and then we'll all just get back on the, on the horse in six
months time.
You know, six months seems arbitrary.
It just seems like a bit of a, a way to make a bit of noise.
And for some organizations, like you say, to try and play catch up.
I guess there's an element of maybe knowing that this wouldn't work, but also giving yourself
a told you so option further down the line if you need it.
I'm like you, Martin, if I take my cynical hat back off and you read the letter, I think
a lot of the concerns are real.
And I think if you look at the speed of change just in March, even people who were broadly
excited by the technology may be feeling a bit nervous about how fast things are moving.
And I have to admit, I'm starting to think like that myself, but I don't think it'll
have an impact on the open AI and Microsoft juggernaut at all.
I think it's tantamount to asking every oil drilling company to stop drilling at some,
at the same time to positively impact climate, climate change for the good of humanity.
That's a great idea.
But I just don't think that every single oil company or in this case, AI company is going
to, is going to shut everything down because it only takes one to plow on regardless.
And then they become the winner that takes all, right?
So I just, I just don't see it.
Yeah.
The stakes are too high.
Absolutely.
There's no, and who's going to enforce this?
Are the US government are going to pass this law change through?
No.
So it's impractical, but I can see why they, why they would push for it.
Yeah, definitely.
It's interesting.
It's prompted some conversations, this type of thing.
I've been having some, some people who've been listening to the podcast and sending
me your messages and asking me my different viewpoints on different things.
I'll be interested to get your viewpoint, Martin, but one of the questions I get is
how scared of AIRU, Paul, because, you know, obviously you're doing a lot of reading and
thinking about this.
And I think ultimately, I think it's got great power and to help a lot of people be more
efficient and effective.
And it's going to have a massive impact for the good of humanity potentially in a lot
of domains, especially things like healthcare and primary research.
And on the business side, it's going to allow us to do more in less time, which I think
is, is already starting to be shown.
I think a key thing is going to be how we choose to use that power and how we choose
to use it remains to be seen a bit.
Paul Roetser at the Marketing AI Institute talks about using this to free people up to
work fewer days and still have the same output and deliver the same outcomes.
And I would honestly love to see that become a reality.
You know, we'll all do three day weeks and AI can pick up the slack.
But my fear is in this capitalist mechanism that underpins Western society, I don't think
we can enable it without government intervention as we live in a sort of a market driven economic
system that emphasizes the pursuit of profit where businesses compete against each other.
So if one business decides to work three days a week in leverage AI to pick up the slack,
it only takes one of the competitors to work five days a week with the same power and they'll
outcompete the other companies.
And so yeah, I'm not quite sure that we can make that happen.
I don't know what your thoughts are on that.
You know, I think there's a societal shift that would be required in order to kind of
see that.
It's in fact, have you listened to the Sam Altman interview?
He's done a two and a half hour interview this week and he talks about, you know, there
is going to be major economic shifts that come about through the deployment of, they're
talking specifically about AGI in that interview and we're not quite there yet.
But you know, things like universal basic income, if you're going to have people working
slightly less, presumably some people at the kind of bottom might see the amount of work
that they have generally reduced.
So their income is lower if AGI and corporations are able to make higher profits with lower
inputs or lower labour costs.
Some of those profits should be more heavily taxed, in which case we should expect to see
from the go to universal basic income scheme so that people do have the ability to earn
a good living doing three days a week.
And the thing Mark said, we should be able to spend our days chasing butterflies.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think that's a great perspective, Martin, and I love the deep questions that Paul Raitzer
asks about this topic and to really get us all thinking because we're going to get, well,
this open letter is because there is now a swelling belief that we're going to get to
all of these things much faster than perhaps we all thought.
And we have to be asking these questions.
We have to be debating how.
And whilst that might sound like a bit of a negative nitty-nitty, I don't mean to.
I mean, we have to look at the system that we're operating because it's probably not
fit for purpose for what systems we're going to have to have in place to make sure that
AI is leveraged for the benefit of people, just not as another accelerator.
We'll take you back to the conversation that we had last week looking at the report that
OpenAI did on the impact of the labour market.
80% of jobs, they estimate, will be impacted 10% by GPTs.
19% of jobs will be impacted 50% by GPTs.
These are substantial figures, 20% of jobs being impacted 50%.
And if you take, you know, kind of extrapolated how, I think there are some more, rather than
just the impact on the jobs, but the nature of the jobs that are going to be impacted.
We've spoken about it before.
If you're a GP, or if you're a HR consultant or a solicitor, your training has always been
on knowledge and having knowledge on a certain corpus of text or, you know, kind of, and
specialism.
If you've now got GPTs that can pass the equivalent exam that you passed, or pass it at a higher
score than the average human that passes those things, that is that, there's not as much,
these high status jobs are going to be diminished.
So there's a whole shift that is about to be undertaken.
And I think there will be a resistance at first, as people say, I'm not going to trust
my, let's say, let's take diagnosis, right?
The thing that you go for a, to a GP for, I'm not going to trust GPT with that.
And people will have a natural reluctance until the fact that some people, a sliver
of people are doing that and they see good results from it and they see it working very
well for them and then over time, more and more people, it's like self-driving cars.
You know, we haven't gone from level zero to level five autonomous driving cars.
We've got gradual improvements in assistance from level one, level two, level three, level
four, level five.
That's where we're going.
We're just starting to see level three autonomous cars coming out into the market.
Next it'll be level four and then it'll be level five.
These things take time.
I think as we start to accept GPTs assisting us, doing things that we previously said could
only be done by a human doctor, a human lawyer, a human this that the other.
Yeah.
Over time that shift is going to incrementally come in and the impact is yet to be seen.
I don't think people have, well, we know people haven't woken up to this yet.
No.
So let's hope, let's hope there's more going on behind the scenes than we know.
And then we're going to talk about a UK government paper later to really start to think about
what societal measures need to be in place in order to try and ensure that the route
that this goes down is the route that, you know, hopefully would benefit the majority
of, if not all of humanity rather than say a select few or actually not really unlocking
a better life for a lot of people like it potentially could have.
I think the other thing I often get asked about is like Skynet, Terminator, like are
the AI's just going to like become self-aware and then kill us all?
And I guess that's possible, but it's, I don't actually, that's not the case I tend to worry
about the most if I do worry.
And I try not to worry Mike because you can't worry about the things you can't control to
some extent, but when I do worry, it's actually the sort of, not those doomsday scenarios,
it's like accidental doomsday where we like accidentally mis-deploy AI on something or
other and the story I've heard, must have read it on a book, I'm sure I've heard it
in a billion podcasts as well, but the one that always sticks with me is this concept
of creating like a paperclip master AI that's brief to develop the most effective paperclip
that it can, manufacture it as efficiently as possible at scale.
And then it's like told, right, go use whatever resources you need to do that.
And of course, untouched, what it does is it uses all the world's resources to create
the best paperclip that it then manufactures a ridiculous efficiency to turn the entire
world into a world of paperclips, leaving no resources for humanity to actually live
on anymore.
And that we, and that the end of the world comes about because there's too many paperclips
and there's not enough anything else.
And the AI just doggedly kept doing it because that's what it's brief was.
I hadn't really thought about that till I heard that story, but I think ironically,
that's much more plausible doomsday scenario than Arnold Schwarzenegger style robots come
to kill us all.
So what we're saying is don't use an office world AI chatbot just in case.
Yeah.
Well, so, you know, who's going to deploy that?
Clippy, isn't it?
It's going to be...
Yeah, he's going to be our overlord.
Robin's hands are glee because this has been his plan for about 30 years and now it's all
come like this.
My time has come.
I mean, ultimately what you're talking about there is an alignment issue, right?
And alignment is one of the big topics in AI in terms of how we create models that align
with humanity.
And that's a big challenge because actually alignment, it means different things to different
people and different cultures and different organizations and different interest groups.
But I think actually those kinds of challenges of AI just getting super literal and running
away with itself on one particular task, I'm less concerned about that.
But I can see how it could all go horribly wrong and we'll turn into paperclips.
Yeah, I think they're all unlikely, but certainly it's that one that...
Not necessarily paperclips, but some unintended consequence.
Yeah.
Like an order consequence that we couldn't predict that you're like, oh, crumbs.
Yeah.
Sorry, that was me.
Yeah.
The entirety of...
One city's always been turned to paperclips.
Time to probably try and stop that AI now.
But right.
So I think that was an important story to cover.
I think if you're a marketer, it's just useful to know the context of how these things are
playing out, but not too much in the applicability there.
Probably in your day-to-day work.
Something that maybe is a bit more applicable is Levi's use of AI-generated models to increase
diversity.
Tell us a bit more about what you saw here this week, Martin.
Levi Strauss has partnered with digital fashion studio, La La Land.ai to create AI-generated
avatars to increase diversity amongst its models.
Now what they're saying is La La Land uses advanced AI to create hyper-realistic models
of various body types, ages, sizes, and skin tones for fashion brands and retailers.
And Levi's is saying that their aim is to offer more personal, inclusive shopping experience
for customers by enabling them to see products on models that resemble them.
There's a lot of fanfare about this and I think it's a fascinating application.
Nice to see some innovation in this space.
I'm always interested to see what the big brands are doing.
We spoke about Coca-Cola doing their partnership with OpenAI recently and this is a very practical
example.
I've seen things like smart mirrors.
I know Amazon tried to do the smart retail app thing where you get the clothes that you
like the look of and you can see them on yourself using the app.
So this is a great example where they're using AI-generated models to increase diversity.
They are saying that the use of AI, well, if we think about what this means for marketers,
it just means that we can have better representation if we're working with models.
On the flip side, if I'm a model from a minority community and the number of opportunities
that I have to find gigs is already quite slim, I might not be looking at this entirely
positively when I'm looking at it going, oh yes, is AI going to take jobs?
In this sense, yes, it very much is taking my job here and now.
So I'm kind of torn and I recognize that as a straight white man, I'm probably not the
best voice or champion of understanding diversity and speaking about it in the right way or
what have you.
But I do think there's a, it didn't sit right with me when I heard this story straight up
the back.
I thought I appreciate and applaud the technology and the use of it.
I don't necessarily like that the whole statement when they released it was really leading with
that diversity message.
To Levi's credit in the press release, they do say, look, we recognize that this isn't
the only thing that's required in order to be a more diverse and inclusive company.
There are other things that we're doing, but I think I thought leading with it was a bit
like, I can see the downside as well as the positives there.
Yeah, I think my gut, I haven't read the press release, but my gut feel is the same as yours,
which is being able to technologically, it's really interesting.
And I think it's only a half a step away from being easily able to dress yourself up in
a bunch of different clothes when buying clothes online without actually having to try them
on.
You could see what you looked like in them potentially.
And I know there are other technologies that are developed and used for that, but you could
see how these would be combined.
My Spidey sense is also tingling because I think this is a very powerful way to show
customized ads to people based on things that you know about them in order to make the ads
resonate more.
We know there's lots of social science studies that show that people tend to like people
like them more and be drawn to people who are like them.
And I think if you see a bunch of ads that are people like you, you're going to be, you
know, perhaps more likely to be influenced and embrace them.
So I can see a powerful advertising component, but the bit about what the impact this has
on those minority groups getting gigs that are probably already quite hard to get.
I completely agree.
That part feels a bit tone deaf to me.
This is like, yeah, business strategy wise, I can absolutely understand why you would
do it.
Society wise, it feels icky as hell.
Honestly.
Yeah, we should probably just leave it at that.
I think so.
Icky as hell.
But what are you talking about?
Need to listen to the full podcast.
Let's see how many times you can say icky as hell.
Right.
Let's get into our next story then.
Let's talk about Bing announcing ads for chat.
So this is kind of interesting.
We've been talking previously like, what's going to happen?
You know, people in chat GPT, they're in Bing, they're using these chat driven tools.
Search engines are kind of paid for and underpinned by the fact that they show relevant ads in
your search results.
Very hard one would have assumed to do that in a natural chat style interface, especially
one that ones that at the moment are starting to experiment with showing the sources that
they're using for getting information.
But of course, that's coming as part of the next phase of the rollout of these tools.
So Microsoft issued a blog post that said they've begun experimenting with ads for
Bing chat, which is sort of chat GPT through through the Bing search interface.
If you like a couple of quotes from that blog post are that they are experimenting with
an expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display
more links from that publisher, giving the user more ways to engage and drive in more
traffic to the publishers website.
So I think there's an element here of trying to overcome the criticism of using other people's
content in chat, but no real attribution and no possible driving of traffic to the original
website.
So we'll see how well that actually works, because I'm not sure if people are going to
click those links, but that'd be good to experiment with.
Another quote was, we're also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad
revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.
So there's a couple of things here in terms of somewhat trying to deliver credit to content
that's in the chat window and therefore some sort of revenue sharing model that I didn't
quite understand that how that's going to work yet.
And then the other example I saw actually showed ads like sponsored content in effect
marked as an ad a little bit like you see on Google search now and Bing search, highlighting
results that were brought back by the chat tool that were effectively paid for.
So this shouldn't come as a huge surprise that Bing would look to monetize or Microsoft
would look to monetize the tool.
It certainly didn't take them very long, right?
Bing chat hasn't been out very long.
I think as a marketer, what this means is it could offer you an innovative way to reach
your audience, especially as more and more people move towards chat based tools.
And I think if this works for Bing and Microsoft, we should probably expect to see other search
providers adopting a similar model in the future.
Possibly it could come to chat GPT free quite quickly, one would assume.
Whether or not it would make it into the paid version chat GPT plus remains to be seen.
There's a bit of me that would hope it wouldn't, if I'm honest, but we shall see.
I think it also opens up opportunities to start experimenting with this because we've
talked previously, Martin, on the podcast and off the podcast.
Where's the commercial opportunity in this, both as an advertising platform, but also
for advertisers?
And marketers spend so much of their time now, digital marketers, looking for the next
digital marketing arbitrage, don't they?
They're looking for that opportunity where marketers can identify a channel or a tactic
that's currently low saturation that they think is going to have an oversized impact
on their marketing results and then use it as quick as possible before it becomes oversaturated
and audiences either tune it out or it becomes too expensive to use at scale.
This is something that's been plaguing a lot of the real time bidding algorithms that underpin
things like Google ads and LinkedIn ads and stuff.
They're really expensive at this point, and especially if you work in e-commerce, it's
hard to make margin on running those ads.
So I guess this could be, is chat the next arbitrage opportunity for marketers to get
in early, start testing it and see if they can get good results for a really low price?
So I think that's how I'm starting to see this as it starts to play out.
What are your thoughts on this bit of news, Martin?
The first example I saw of it was from someone doing a search about the price of a car.
How much does a certain car cost at this moment in time?
And it had the price and it had a link to an article where this price was.
It was such a strange ad placement and I couldn't see myself, as far as I could tell from that
example actually, when you clicked on it, it was actually almost like a car review website.
I don't honestly know for sure, but it didn't seem like it was taking me to a dealership
where I was going to buy it.
Maybe I was wrong there.
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head when you were saying, will people actually
click on these?
How much are people going to engage with it?
The other thing is how much are people going to engage with it when plugins are coming
out?
How much are people going to be using Bing Chat compared to ChatGPT plugins where it's
connected to Kayak and I can just do my search and it's going to tell me the itinerary that
I can choose and give me the hotel that I've asked it to find and I'll just click on it
that way.
So yeah, I'm really interested to see how users actually interact with it.
I suspect this is a first roll of the dice by Bing who has just gone, right, let's get
something out and see what happens.
Will this be the long-term solution?
Will they look to actually use, I mean, it's almost certain that we're going to have some
sort of remarketing based elements to this where chat topics will be used in the same
way that search topics will be used and if you say, what's the best itinerary for a holiday
in Crete, next thing you'll see is ads chasing you around the web for holidays in Crete.
That kind of makes sense.
I can see that being implemented.
But yeah, these particular in-context ad units, the other thing is does that, as an end user,
do I then trust the chat less and anything that harms the credibility or if I start to
see that actually this response just feels entirely sponsored and it's not giving me
the content that I'm after, are people going to shift to different LLM?
So when there's open source models that are being run, they're just as big and powerful
as GPT-4 or what have you, people just look elsewhere.
So yeah, I mean, ultimately we're at day one, are we?
And I think the market is, yes, if now there is an opportunity to capitalise on this as
a new channel, then go for it.
But don't be surprised if in six months time the whole thing has completely shifted and
these ad units no longer exist.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's interesting when you say that and you give the kayak example and of course when
ChatGPT launched its plugins as we covered in last week's episode, if you haven't listened
to it yet, available by all good podcast subscription services, the first 20 that were selected,
it was quite an interesting mix, but they were like Expedia and Kayak both in there,
right?
Both massively battling for where their almost entire model now is based on people who Google
for holidays and things and then providing price comparisons and that type of stuff.
Did Kayak and Expedia and those other platforms that were in the first 20 plugins to date
pay for that opportunity, right?
Because you could imagine that it probably would be worth paying for in order to be one
of those first plugins.
How does it work when all of Kayak's competitors get a plugin?
Do you sort of drift towards your favourite plugin and you have to activate the plugin
to make that search?
That's how the plugins work at the moment.
That's how it works right now.
The plugins, so it's going to be a brand thing, isn't it?
Absolutely.
So then what do you end up with?
Some sort of app marketplace where a little bit like you have on sort of Play Store and
the Apple Store now, where you can sponsor specific search terms in the app store to
make sure your app is up at the top.
And is that how this all then starts to the monetisation of the aspect of this, which
of course for most marketers is not going to be super relevant.
But in terms of how the platforms evolve and how they make money and how businesses like
Kayak and other businesses that want you searching their inventories, their product lists or
whatever, you leverage the tools to drive commercial value.
It's going to be fascinating because it is day one, like you said, Martin, and I think
there's going to be a lot of twists and turns in this story as we see and as the businesses
involved, Microsoft, Google and others have to snake and pivot around and test things
to figure out what's going to work from a commercial standpoint because quite hard to
imagine and bet for sure on what will, I would say.
Yeah.
And these systems are going to be expensive to run, expensive to develop.
At some point they've got to start generating revenue and users are very quickly going to
have diversity of options.
The other day I was sat there with Bard open, with Bing chat open and with chat GPT open
all on the same screen.
Already we have three chat interfaces that start talking to it.
I can already make these decisions.
Competition is already rife.
So yeah, you've got to make sure that it doesn't detract from the user experience because as
we know UX is such a differentiator, hence chat GPT becoming the fastest product knowledge
ever versus GPT 3 having been around for two years, barely having made a dent.
Yeah.
So funny, isn't it?
Right.
I think probably time to move on to the next story.
This is with you, Martin.
Tell us about this UK government news around this artificial intelligence white paper.
So regulation in AI is a hot topic at the moment and there's a lot of it in the ether,
in the US, China and EU, all of which looking at this area and the UK now that we live in
post-Brexit Britain, obviously isn't going to be part of the EU regulatory framework.
So the UK government has unveiled what they're calling a world leading approach to innovation
in artificial intelligence to turbocharge growth.
This white paper talks about a few interesting things.
One that the main thing to come out of it is actually the UK's approach is going to
be quite light touch.
So what they're saying is that AI contributed already 3.7 billion to the UK economy and
going forward UK government's approach to regulating AI will be based on five guiding
principles of safety, transparency, fairness, accountability and contestability and there's
definitions of each of those.
What they're saying is that they're not going to put in a dedicated regulator overseeing
AI.
It's going to be existing regulators in place to have AI as part of their regulatory remit.
So existing regulators are going to have to adapt and they are saying that they are empowering
existing regulators to take their own tailored approaches based on the different sectors.
So banking can take their own approach, help and what have you can all take their own approach.
In order to enable businesses to kind of figure out what will or won't work in any regulatory
environment they are launching a £2 million fund to basically enable sandbox trials.
So what they'll say is businesses can basically experiment and work alongside the regulators
and put ideas together and they can figure out whether their uses of AI fit within whatever
the regulators in that industry seem to be appropriate.
So what of it?
Well it's been criticised in some corners as being too light touch and placing it at
odds with global trends in AI regulation.
Some people saying that consumer groups and privacy activists saying that it's not going
to go far enough.
There is no statutory body or statutory mechanism to enforce anything.
It's all very, it's so light touch it's kind of a real hands off approach from a legislation
perspective.
It's all devolved, all of the power is going to be devolved to the regulators.
And when you think about the regulators as is, how well funded are they?
How much extra resource are they going to have to monitor or manage and regulate all
of these new technologies which are as we've just discussed moving at kind of break net
speed.
They're going to be able to keep up with these changes.
So I said that this is at odds with the rest of the world.
In the USA they've got the Algorithmic Accountability Act 2022 which is a voluntary AI framework
but companies are required to assess the impact of AI in however they're using it.
China is introducing specific laws addressing AI risks with mandatory user notifications
when AI algorithms are involved when they deal with a business.
So if a business uses AI as part of a kind of profiling, maybe it's kind of risk management
or insurance thing, the consumer has to be told that there is an AI mechanism to that.
So they've actually enforced that.
And that's moved past the kind of discussion stage or the proposal stage.
This is actually being rolled out as we speak.
The EU has the Artificial Intelligence Act which is kind of still being worked on.
No firm paper yet.
It's not been fully introduced but that's going to include some interesting mechanisms
such as grading AI products by potential harm.
So for instance, an AI that analyzes emails and assesses whether they are spam or not
is going to be lower harm than something that uses biometric profiling for anything.
Or that makes paper clips.
Or that turns all of the world's resources into paper clips.
So the EU one is the one with the broadest scope and it actually goes so far as to say
that there are some AI uses that are prohibited.
So for instance, social grading by governments is prohibited under the proposals from the
EU which I guess is kind of probably a response to people's concerns that they've heard about
the way that China does the social credit score and different mechanisms.
I don't know, maybe not.
I've not read the pay hook.
It's kind of in line with the EU's understandable stances in a number of areas.
In GDPR in terms of protecting people's privacy and ensuring that they're not categorized
and treated differently based on what factors.
AI is going to start grading people.
I think A, a big sense and B, I think it's much more in line with things the EU has done
in the past.
With regard to the UK law, I think there's a wider commercial reality for any companies
that are looking to develop their own products or services using AI.
And that is that if they're developing these products and services, they're probably going
to want to develop them to sell them in markets such as the US, the EU or China.
So much like when GDPR was introduced, this resulted in many American organizations basically
aligning with GDPR standards, right, with EU standards, because they recognized that
it was useful and beneficial to them.
And actually GDPR ended up becoming the gold standard for data protection regulation around
the world.
It's kind of the blueprint that people take and adapt for their own markets.
So I think we'll see the same ultimately down the line with AI regulation.
So countries around the world, depending on their sphere of influence on a geopolitical
scale will either look to use the AI algorithmic accountability act in America.
If they're maybe in North America, maybe Canada, Mexico, they'll kind of lean on the American
framework in the EU kind of sphere of influence.
Countries will look at the EU framework and what have you.
So on the face of it, the UK government's approach of being an outlier in this domain
does have some upsides.
They can say, you know, we're supporting innovation, we're not going to be heavy handed on regulation.
There are potential benefits.
I can see that some businesses might want to use the UK as a bit of a testbed.
And then maybe if a product or some sort of innovation is quite successful, maybe they
can then lean on EU regulators, US regulators to say, you know, this isn't harmful.
Can you change the rules to enable us to introduce the similar mechanism in your market?
We can become a bit of a testing ground.
That said, there's also a bit of me which is slightly cynical where I go, you know,
is this just an easy way for the government to say, we just don't have the resource to
enforce this?
We're basically outsourcing the regulation because we're not the big players in the world.
We're not setting regulatory standards in the way that we have done in the past.
That's down to the EU, the US, and we'll just kind of leave it to the market to figure out
where to go.
From a kind of commercial investment decision, are businesses that are working heavily in
AI going to be looking at London as a place to invest for AI development?
Are we going to be looking at the UK and go, that's the place to develop because they've
got less regulation in this area?
I don't think so because of the reasons I've outlined previously.
I think they're going to be looking.
If the UK is the place to develop, I think it's going to be based on different factors
like our skills, it could be levels of investment, what have you.
I don't think this light of regulation is going to be it because as I mentioned, if
you're developing an AI product or service, you're going to be selling into the EU and
the US, so you're probably aligning with their frameworks as is.
Yeah.
Anyway, regardless of where you actually, if you developed it in the UK, where it was
a bit looser, that makes perfect sense to me, Martin.
That sounds like it's the type of nuanced interplay that we're seeing happening at the
regulation level, which as marketers, we want to know how strict the rules are going to
be on the people who are making the tools that we want to use because of course, the
more regulation there is, the more tightly controlled the feature sets will be and the
harder it will probably be to bring products to market, one assumes.
That will then have a downstream impact on what we do and what tools we can use.
I guess also, potentially even what we can do as marketers in terms of how far does this
regulation stretch into content that you produce using AI and tactics that you use.
You mentioned retargeting earlier, right?
There's a version of the world where the AI is going to be much better at retargeting
than even the mechanisms that we have now and profiling people effectively and how acceptable
is that going to be?
Fascinating one.
Yeah, I think auditability as well, being able to dig into the models.
This is something that the EU regulation is going to be big on, which is being able to
interrogate the weights and biases basically within the models.
That's something that I think marketers are going to have to be aware of going forward.
If you're using a product, maybe you're buying some AI services, you've got to be prepared
to maybe audit those underlying models as well.
That's going to be hard when OpenAI, who was supposed to be in the title, is now not sharing
those details and so that you don't know how the model works.
Maybe OpenAI will have to be more open because regulation will require all large language
models to show us how the weights and biases and probability matrices and all those other
things work.
Fascinating.
Well, Martin, that was a good one.
Thanks for sharing that with us.
You've got another one for us as well.
You've got some tweets that you saw Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot, share about
AI and the future content marketing that I think you've nicely summarized for us so that
we don't have to go through the whole thing ourselves.
Yeah.
What does AI mean for the future of content marketing?
Got some really good replies.
It was a fascinating thread to read through.
I was trying to find some broad categories because there was quite a lot in there.
And this came off the back of GPT-4 and just this kind of step-changing quality of output.
And you could just see that people's concern over low quality content where SEO had once
ruled what's its future going to be.
So I would say that it kind of got it down to five key themes really.
So one of the things that came up a couple of times was people talking about AIO, artificial
intelligence.
Not AIAIO, because that would be AIAIO.
The artificial intelligence optimization becoming the new SEOs.
And Nelson Joyce replied saying AIO is the new SEO.
And this kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about how do you get your content
into the Bing chat?
For the past couple of years, people have been talking about how do you write a blog
so that you end up getting in the featured snippet on Google.
That's been a big thing for content marketers.
Well how do you make sure that your content is now referenced in Bing chat or that your
kind of model or framework, whatever it is that you want to talk about, is the thing
that the AI puts forward to the readers.
So that's going to be an interesting one, once the AIO plays out.
Because if you take it on the paradigm that we've operated in with large language models
up until about two weeks ago, there was a hard cut off with the data.
If you were waiting to optimize your data on the old model, it's been trained up to
September 21, when's the next model going to be updated and released?
And then imagine if you didn't get your results straight away.
It's like the core updates in Google.
At least they come every six months or something.
Having to wait three years for a new LLM update would be a bit painful.
So now that they're actually connected to the web and we've got plugins and we've got
crawlers and all sorts of integrations, then yeah, I think AIO is going to be something
that people need to pay attention to.
Another theme, human centric content.
We've spoken about this before.
People are going to have to have more personality, real humans, faces talking like this, you
know, conversations with words and emotions and laughter and mistakes, all of that kind
of stuff that humans do that AIs don't do so well.
That's going to become increasingly important.
Yeah.
Humanizing it and really, yeah, allowing us to empathize and connect with it in a different
way to robotically generated text.
Yeah, I think so that's going to be a trust content will be king was something that one
of the tweets said.
So they're just going to be, so, you know, what does it mean for the future of content
marketing?
Evolving tools and roles.
So new tools and in-house jobs or agencies for AI driven content.
Brett, someone called Brett said, QA as a service for AI driven content development.
Which I thought was an interesting, interesting one.
I'm not entirely sure I understood it fully, but you know, I totally get that.
So one of the things I've read is AI as much as anything, chat GPT is a powerful tool for
experts because you can ask it to produce a bit of content, but you also have the necessary
expertise to identify when it's hallucinating and talking absolute nonsense.
And so QA as a service would, to me is getting an expert in that domain to review the output
of chat GPT and making sure it hasn't spoken a load of crap, basically, which I can, I
can actually imagine, especially because that's part of the value that Bystrata brings, right?
Like we, when we produce content for clients as a life science specialist with writers
with PhDs and stuff like that, we can understand the content that we're creating, you know,
have peer to peer conversations with client subject matter experts and produce really
good content first time because we understand the topic.
I can quite imagine that if I hired a new marketing grad tomorrow who didn't have a
science background and then asked chat GPT to write me a blog about confocal microscopy,
that person that quite understandably wouldn't be able to tell fact from fiction in chat
GPT's output.
But one of my writers would because they've been working in this field a number of years
and they've got the scientific expertise to, to QA the content.
So yeah, I'm not surprised to see that.
I hadn't quite thought of it as a service, to be honest.
Because I think it, I think great content is not just, is it technically accurate?
I think there's a lot of other things that make content great in terms of narrative structure,
covering the key points, piffiness, readability in marketing, being honestly persuasive and
compelling and encouraging a person to take another action, all of which AI is getting
better at, but I don't think is there yet.
So that I think is where I guess the question is what do you consider QA?
But yeah, that's an interesting one.
And yeah, something I think I will be keeping an eye on as an idea.
Yeah, and the last one I want to mention in terms of the themes was increased alignment
and faster response to market events.
So it's just going to enable people to respond quicker to changing market conditions or environments.
Wait, so Hello Margo said way faster response to new problems or events.
And I think again, it's just that we've spoken about this before AI content efficiency, you
can get things done quicker.
So yeah, I think it's just going to enable people to produce more quickly.
It was an interesting discussion.
I think the main thing for me though was in fact, oh, there, here we go.
Kit Bodner.
So Kit Bodner used to be the CMO at HubSpot.
I believe he replied saying content marketing will be driven by the things AI isn't as good
at.
Point of view, personality, people connection.
Education content will be fully commoditized.
Creators will win.
Brand will have to partner and hire creators to have differentiation in the market.
That is a hell of a quote.
I think I agree with every single part of that.
I actually thought that was really interesting.
Right.
So basically all the stories for this week.
And then we were going to look at a tool of the week this week, which is GoCharlie.
You've been playing with GoCharlie, Martin, tell us about it.
GoCharlie is an AI writing assistant, much in the same vein as tools like Jasper and
Writer and well, take your pick.
There's been loads of them.
What makes GoCharlie different?
No, because let's be honest, now that we have such easy interfaces to interact with the
likes of ChatGPT and say, write me a blog introduction or write me some email subject
lines.
The value that we used to get from these writing assistants has largely been diminished because
the instruct power is so capable in ChatGPT.
However, GoCharlie is a bit different.
They've been, the team at GoCharlie has done a great job at really extending the power
of LLMs and integrating kind of multimodal capabilities.
So I think the team there have done a brilliant job.
Shout out to Brennan and the team.
I think they've done, like I say, done some good work.
For example, Content Repurposer.
This is a fantastic little tool.
So Content Repurposer allows you to add some content, closing the name, right?
So you can add a link to a YouTube video or you can upload an MP4 or an MP3.
You can upload audio as well.
And then you can then choose the output that you want and you can get it to write a blog
post.
You can get it to summarize the content.
You can get it to do some LinkedIn content or Twitter content.
And it's really, really good.
If you take, for instance, the audio from a podcast, I can't imagine where this example
might have come from, but if you take the audio recording of a podcast and stick it
into the Content Repurposer, it will write you a blog post summarizing that content.
So they've done a really good job with that.
You've got, if you create a blog post using one of these tools, it introduces suggested
images as well.
And it actually puts in prompts that you can put into an image generator like Dali or Stable
Diffusion as well.
It does have an image generation tool in it, so it doesn't bake it in.
I think that will come down the line.
But I really like the product, the interface, it's quite cheeky.
They've got Charlie is this little illustrated cartoon dog.
There's a little Easter egg mode where you can turn it on and it turns all the icons
to rashes of bacon.
Who doesn't love bacon?
It's quite playful, but actually, who doesn't like bacon?
Don't at me, vegetarians.
I was just thinking a lot of people don't like bacon, but you like bacon and that's
absolutely your choice.
I know.
Bacon, yeah.
So the interface is easy to use.
They've got loads of templates for things like product description, subject lines, blog
introductions, that kind of stuff.
They're all very good and very capable.
What I think they're really pushing the envelope on is bringing in these other technologies,
for instance, like the transcription and the content repurposing.
Being able to take a YouTube video, particularly if it's something that's quite short, if you
get something like 15 minutes long, stick it in and it turns it into a blog in one click
and you go, okay, that's cool.
So are there any limits with it?
I know a lot of the writing tools, you have to pay more and more and more to get more
words and more characters, is that the similar thing with GoCharlie?
Yeah.
So there are, here's on their plans, to be honest, I'm not sure of the, they have a teams
plan, an unlimited plan and a kind of entry plan, I believe.
They've just launched the teams plan.
Oh, I'm just looking.
One monthly charge, unlimited content for growth.
So the charge is a little higher than some of the other tools.
So if you, the freelance entry one's $39 a month, but there's no caps on it, which for
a lot of the tools that are cheaper than that, there are character or word limit caps on
that.
So that, that could make it interesting.
I love that some of the things you described there in terms of being able to feed it audio
and have it create the blog post.
I did that all this week in the most convoluted way possible probably by the sounds of things,
because I use whisper API to transcribe the audio of our last podcast.
And then I fed the transcription in sections into chat GPT four and had it create blog
sections off the back of it.
And I couldn't help but think while I was doing it, there must be a better tool and
a better way out there to do that.
How good are the blog summaries?
Are they, are they decent and decent length?
Because when I've used other tools like this in the past, they've turned an hour's transcription
into about 300 words and completely missed a lot of the value and the nuance of the actual
thing I was trying to feed it.
Yeah.
So there is, there is a limit.
Um, and I think that comes down to, I don't know what tools they're using in terms of
whisper API, um, or what have you.
I put in a transcript from one of our, sorry, I put in the audio recording from our blog.
Uh, sorry.
I'll get me words out in a second.
This isn't real human content with real mistakes.
Real, real genuine human mistakes.
One of our recent episodes, I uploaded the content and it basically missed the, a good
chunk of the podcast, probably like 25% of the content was missing from the summary.
Um, so yeah, it's what output length itself though, it was a decent blog length.
It was, you know, if memory serves me right, that one was around a thousand words.
So it wasn't short, but it didn't capture everything.
I think there are some, some limitations there, but the tool that cracks that, the tool that
cracks getting a full length transcript, breaking it down into the appropriate number of tokens,
feeding that through and then piecing it all back together.
That is going to be, well, as someone who has to edit, summarize and write show notes
for a podcast, I think that's going to be fantastic.
Well, me too.
Uh, someone who does similar.
Um, I mean, the blog post that I produced in the end was drifting towards 3000 words.
So it was extensive because I really wanted to do justice to the stories that we'd covered
because not everybody has the time or inclination to listen to a podcast.
Um, but yes, I do think, I do think that that tool would be valuable.
And if, as we suspect more brands lean into human content, which probably ends up being
audio and video, because that's how you know, it's a human, at least at the moment, um,
more and more, we're probably going to want to have access to these tools to do those
summaries and those blog posts and those social posts that do the original recordings justice.
Because at the moment, the only way I could find was that convoluted way I described.
And it sounds like GoCharlie's getting there.
It sounds honestly better than a number of the other tools I've tried, but still not
quite maybe what we ideally really want.
Yeah, it's not far off.
It's certainly not far off.
I think the way that the team are developing at the moment, you know, I see they've got
a very active community that, um, that they're really taking on board, uh, user feedback.
Another thing I didn't mention actually, they have image generation, so you can create,
um, 4k images.
So they're nice upscaled images, but they've also got in-painting, which I think is a nice
feature because, um, you don't see that on, on so many of the image generation tools.
Yeah.
You can highlight those bits that you, you don't have to go create a new image.
You can highlight a little bit of the image like, Oh, can you change this from orange
to red?
Or can you remove that football from the background or whatever?
Interesting.
I think I'm going to have to go and have a play with that one.
It sounds intriguing, right?
So thank you very much for taking us through that and telling us a bit more about your
experiences with GoCharlie.
Cool.
I think that's us done for another episode, isn't it, Martin?
I think that is.
Well, as always, thank you for your time.
Always lovely to hang out with you too, the listeners.
I hope you've enjoyed that and that it's been beneficial.
If it's been useful for you and you've not subscribed yet, please do subscribe.
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So more thing before we go on.
We have the Twitter account.
Oh, no, I Twitter account.
So please do follow us and send us your feedback.
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So follow us on Twitter, AI Marketing Pod.
Say hello, tell us your thoughts.
I'm so glad you said that, Martin, because not only would I love like Martin would love
for you to send us your thoughts, what we're really looking for as well is Ninja Marketing
Applications.
If you've done something cool with AI that's sort of beyond the bog standard, I asked Chat
GPT to give me a blog post and then it did.
We'd love to hear from, from you because some of the, and maybe it's one that you did yourself
and we'd love to like talk about what you've done.
You could even come on the show and we'll happily interview you about what you've done.
Or maybe it's just something cool that you saw that you think we should see so that we
can bring it up here and share it with the, with the rest of the community.
Please do.
Because I think there's some really exciting stuff happening in the margins where people
are just doing something creative with these tools, thinking outside the box and getting
some really amazing results.
We talked about the success of the Shopify, uh, cold, uh, cold outreach email program
last week.
And if you've got them, we'd love to hear you hit us up on the Twitter's and share them
with us and ask you questions and share your best applications and all that good stuff.
Nice one.
Thank you, Martin.
I will look forward to you speaking to you next time.
See you next week.
Bye.
Cheers.
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