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 11 of Artificially Intelligent Marketing.
I'm here with my very good friend Martin Broadhurst. How are you doing Martin?
Oh Paul, it's great to see you. I'm back in the saddle, ready to talk AI on a Friday afternoon.
Still doesn't get any better than that, does it? We've got a bunch of really good stories
to get through today as always. We're going to go deep into a few topics. We're going
to talk about a company called Causal who used AI to generate a ton of content for their
website and draw in a lot of traffic from search. Fairly controversial in many ways,
so we're going to get into that. We're going to talk about some amendments to the proposed
amendments to the EU AI Act and what that would mean for both the companies producing
tools but also marketers as users of those tools. And we're going to talk about ChatGPT's
plugin rollout to all users. We're also going to hear from an industry colleague of ours,
Liam Lally, who's a PPC specialist from Zaddle. He's going to input his expert opinion on
the automated PPC debate that we had in last week's episode. We'll get into that a bit
later on. And we're also going to look at a tool of the week, which this week is going
to be the voice generation tool, Jenny. And there's more. We're also going to look at
some short snippets from across the worlds of AI and marketing. And we'll do that before
we get into everything else. So let's take a look at some of those short snippets. So
a couple of quick things then. ChatGPT is launching an iPhone app. Not massive news,
but it's probably going to take the place of a few apps that sprung up in that space
when ChatGPT and OpenAI weren't able to get into it fast enough. Perhaps the most interesting
thing about it is that you can speak to it. So it will do transcription using OpenAI's
whisper and in essence, you'll be able to talk to your phone and then get it to do some
stuff for you. So that will start potentially to make ChatGPT a bit more of a competitor
to Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant and those types of things.
The biggest feature that they introduced in this that I was impressed with is the simple
search functionality to be able to search your conversations rather than having to just
scroll endlessly through your chat history.
You can search your conversations now.
Apparently so. I haven't tried it yet because I'm not on iPhone and I'm not in America,
but apparently you can search your conversations.
They'll have to bring that to the desktop app, surely?
I mean, you would think that's a given, but I would have thought it was a given having
it from the off. I guess this ChatGPT interface was developed by about four people in an afternoon
from what I understand.
So we should be amazed with what we have.
Yeah, exactly.
All right. Well, that's good. I don't have an iPhone either, so I won't be playing with
that anytime soon. But if anybody who listens to the podcast does get to have a play, we'd
love to hear what your experiences are. Hit us up on the Linkedins and the Twitters.
Meta is planning to create it own AI chips. So they're joining Google, Microsoft and Amazon
in the custom chip game, one assumes because they don't have to completely rely on other
suppliers like Nvidia, but also because GPUs, which power a lot of machine learning research
and also the final tools that are launched also run on GPUs. But it's likely that custom
chips is going to be better. That is also connected to a story this week in Forbes about
just how expensive it is to run these generative AI models in data centers. I think they were
projecting that by 2028, the cost of running the models on data centers would be more than
76 billion dollars. So I guess anything you can do to make that better, including custom
chips makes sense.
When I saw that Forbes story mine, I was prompted to think to myself, prompt being the iterative
word that if the product is free or near free and these data centers are costing billions
of dollars to run, then you are the product. So that might be something for us all to remember
as we rush to leverage Bard and Bing, especially because they are free at the moment and even
ChatGPT, it's relatively low price.
Yeah. And if you think about what they're getting from all of the feedback from users
giving the thumbs up and thumbs down to responses in ChatGPT, that is reinforcement learning
from human feedback. That's something that they've trained the models on historically
with people being paid 10 to 15 dollars an hour. Now they've got the whole world doing
it for free. So yeah, I was going to say it's a cost saving, but I'm sure that the GPU expense
is slightly more than the wage bill for those humans previously.
Yes. Well, that's certainly something they're getting out of it. Who else knows what other
purposes they might have with the data that we share and the information and the experiences
we're having with the tool. But I suspect that's a big chunk of it, Martin. I think
you're right. Another new story this week was that Google's new medical AI MedPalm 2,
which Martin talked a little bit about last week, scored over 80% on a medical exam that
a typical human would only get about 60% on. So that's pretty interesting stuff.
And when we say a typical human, we are talking people trained on training to be doctors.
Not like me, if I did the exam, I don't think I'd get 60%.
Yes. Trained people who understand and should do well on that test versus say a four year
old or Martin. I'm not suggesting they're the same thing.
No comparison at all.
No comments on the domain. No comment. Right. We'll move on. There is a general feeling
that we've been sensing around the web that Palm 2, Google's new model is meaning that
BARD is faster and provides better output. So there seems to be a fair bit of chat on
the Twittersphere and it's certainly been my experience and I think yours as well, Martin,
that it's better than it was. It also has a really cool new export to Gmail or G-Docs
button, which I really love because if you then ask it to draft an email for you, you
can click a button and it puts that straight into a new composed message for you in Gmail,
which is pretty cool. At the same time, it does seem that very creative things like really
interesting poetry and some of the other things that ChatGPT 4 has been able to do. BARD is
not up to that level when it comes to being creative. So we're drifting into already starting
to drift into which of the models is best for what you're or which of the tools is best
for what you're trying to do because in general, BARD is a heck of a lot faster than ChatGPT
4 as well. So it's sort of like horses for courses on that one. Many of you might have
seen that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and other industry experts spent three hours testifying
before the US Senate and that there was a general consensus that AI needs to be regulated
but it's such a complicated issue, nobody seems to be able to suggest a good mechanism
of regulation that everyone thinks would actually work. So we'll all have to keep an eye on
that. And then there was a couple of other cool stories. There is a company called Hippocratic
AI, which has just received a ton of funding, I think $50 million recently to develop an
AI driven platform to provide medical advice. So like WebMD but driven by AI, co-founded
by a team of physicians and hospital administrators, Medicare pros, AI researchers, etc. So that's
pretty cool. It's got some fairly significant and well-known investors including Andreessen
Horowitz. So that might be something to keep an eye on, especially as the CEO of Hippocratic
AI, Munjal Shah has said that their tool outperforms GPT-4 and Claude in over 100 healthcare certifications.
So we've just talked about how good MedPalm 2 is, that would imply Hippocratic AI is even
better. So that'll be interesting to see how that plays out. There is another company that
raised a ton of cash recently, which is Everseen, who raised $71 million for its computer vision
that prevents self-checkout theft. I'm sure we're all used now to being a number of places,
for example, supermarkets where we go through the self-checkout, but they have this cool
new computer vision tool to make sure that all the things that you're walking around
with and that you actually pass them through the checkout, which is pretty interesting.
So yeah.
You can't be stealing those carrier bags anymore.
Yeah, carrier bags, chewing gum.
How many carrier bags did you take? None.
Didn't use any.
How many did you use today? Well, it depends, like how you're going to work it out. Oh,
crumbs. No, you can't. So that's some short snippets from around the web this week. Let's
jump into this first story then, Martin, because I think it's an interesting one. So a financial
modeling SaaS startup called Causal successfully increased their SEO, their traffic from search
to 750,000 visits a month using 100% AI generated content. So many, what feels like years ago,
but it's probably mere weeks or maybe a month at best, we talked on the podcast, Martin,
about generating content at scale with, with ChatGPT and other tools and with the quality
of the content and would Google and other search engines basically penalize you for
having AI generated content? And what this would imply is at least in this case, the
answer is no, presumably because it's too hard for them to detect that it's AI generated
or that not that much time has gone by for Google to actually identify another search
engines and do something about it. The way that they did this is that they identified
a bunch of topics with high potential keywords, chose six of them, and then created thousands
of pages targeting those keywords at scale using a tool called ByWord. So that was their
strategy. Then they put it all up on a website and did all the usual things to ensure that
it was, the website was technically optimized for all the other things that Google and other
search engines would expect in order to rank a website on search engine results pages.
It's proven to be highly effective so far. And then the key question I think for us to
debate here, Martin, is with the success of this approach by Causal, the fact that ByWord
is a tool that anybody can now go and use to create AI content at scale, presumably,
I'm going to put a massive asterisk on that even before we start our debate, is will there
now be a race on for brands to try and generate as much content as possible and throw it up
on their websites to see if they can reproduce what Causal did? So what's your thought on
this story, Martin?
I think the race started a while ago and this is just one of the first examples that we're
likely to see in the coming months. From reading the case study, I think they chose a few interesting
approaches. It looks like they did kind of glossary index pages that then linked out
to subtopics and so on. So there was a bit of thought into how to structure the content
at least. And I think if we go back to the question that you've brought, the idea that
the search engines haven't yet discovered or found a way of identifying this as AI content,
I think Google have been quite clear so far. So they don't really care as long as the content
is helpful and relevant. So if it's passing some authority check and if we look at the
kind of tools out there, say authority, kind of relevance or topic depth, they have their
sentiment analysis and semantic frameworks that's, sorry, sentiment analysis is completely
the wrong phrase there. That kind of semantic graph that says, okay, these are the topics
if you want to rank for this thing, these are the topics you've got to be talking about
to be an authority on this. Clearly, Causal have done their research there, hence identifying
those topics in the first place. Is this going to work for other people? Absolutely. I think
if you've got the resources to invest in this, and it sounds like you don't need particularly
deep pockets and you just need a bit of time to run the AIs and do a bit of the research
upfront and then post it into WordPress or wherever, you will see big results. Will it
last in the long term? That's the question. It strikes me that this is a, there is a limited
window to make hay here. And that I think comes from two observations. One is that everybody's
going to be doing this, therefore Google will find other ways of ranking or finding signals.
We know that Google has the EAT, expertise, authority, trustworthiness, but they've also
included experience in that. So it's now experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
And the experience is looking for real people that have real credibility in this space.
So things like podcasts and videos and speaking events and published papers, these are all
going to make a difference and you can't do that at scale. So that's going to become increasingly
important. And the second thing is there's a general question about how important SEO
or how impactful SEO is going to be with that demo that we saw at Google AI where quite
literally the generative AI, a big green box on the Google search page just pushed away
the organic search results as if to say, you're no longer relevant. That is going to cannibalise
organic traffic for publishers. So sure, make hay while the sun is shining, but do not expect
this to be a long-term sustainable strategy.
Yeah, I'd agree. And I think we're back as well to just because you can produce a lot
of content and get a load of traffic, even if it's in the short term, you need that content
to be speaking about the genuine pains and challenges and interests of your customers.
You need to be able to, at some point, position the value of your offering. You need to be
able to do something with that traffic and you need that traffic to be relevant. So at
the very least, it can probably do a job at the top of the funnel to drag people to your
website. But by the way, if those people are not the right people for your business, then
in essence, is there any point in doing it at all for most brands? Question mark. But
I think we both know what we think about that, Mark, which is that I probably wouldn't bother.
I think the other thing that's interesting about the tool is it's one of the more expensive
content generators on the market. So if you wanted to really do this at scale with basically
unlimited credits, you'd have to spend two and a half thousand dollars a month, which
is a lot more than, you know, the Jaspers and the copy.ai's and the Go Charlies of the
world. And one of the things that actually lists in its monthly plans as a feature is
detector evasion. So it's clearly trying to bake this, you can get away with this Google
won't know into its USP.
Well, that annoys me because the detectors themselves are just trash at the moment anyway.
So as a selling point, I mean, yeah, detector evasion. I think you're just speaking out
to, well, to be fair, you know, every time I speak to people about AI content, one of
the big questions is can it be detected by Google? And I think people are unaware of
just how many false positives and false negatives come out of these detections. They're just
totally inaccurate at the moment. Certainly not accurate enough for the search engines
to be looking to actually deploy them into their systems at the moment. So, but yeah,
good on them if that's how they want to position their products. I can't comment on this product
at all. I haven't seen it. I haven't used it. But if this is working for that company,
then I think to your point there, if this is driving traffic, great. You then just moving
on to the next part of the process, how much of that are you actually converting? And that's
the interesting part of the story. Great. If this is a SaaS company wanting to drive
a lot of traffic, fantastic. But SaaS company is not a publisher that gets paid per impression.
SaaS company gets paid on new subs. And that's the interesting part of the story for me.
Yeah, which is the bit that we don't know, right? And it's certainly, dear listeners,
we don't want this to come across as a byword. But actually that was never the intent of
what we were intending from this discussion. It sounds like a powerful tool that at least
one company has used to great effect. There's a gap in the market to do this type of thing.
And I'm sure a number of other companies are doing something similar, just maybe not quite
as sophisticatedly as perhaps byword enables. And again, I haven't played with it either,
so I can't say for sure. I still can't help but feel, and my recommendation would be just
because you can doesn't mean you should. And I personally, I wouldn't recommend to any
of our clients to go down this route. I still think that the opportunity here is how can
you create insightful content that can't be produced easily by AI, by a bot basically,
because that's what's going to differentiate your brand and deliver genuinely interesting
and valuable information to your audience, whether that's content that you create by
interviewing your technical SMEs or working with your customers and talking about their
use cases and applications of your products or whatever it may be, because that's kind
of B2B. And then how do you leverage that content at scale would be a better question,
I think, than how can I produce in a content farm style a load of content about a given
topic but the bot wrote it all and doesn't necessarily know what's going to be interesting
over the next one, two or three years. Because at least as it stands, I don't think any of
those bots are going to the key industry conferences and hearing from the key opinion leaders speaking
in the keynotes. So I still think that's where the magic is going to be in terms of brands
being able to differentiate the content they produce. The other thing is doing cool things
like industry reports, again, surveys and gathering insights about what's going on in
your market that no one else can possibly know, certainly not bots, but probably none
of your competitors either. And then again, figuring out after you've done the hard work
of doing the survey and analysis or whatever it may be, how do you then promote that at
scale and then I'm sure there are ways that you can use AI to write short summaries and
create social media snippets and all these other things. What do you think, Martin?
Yeah, exactly. The insight is where the value is going to be again, going back to the Google
eat principle, real insight, real people, real expertise, real authority. That's ultimately
where in a world of AI generated content, the winners will actually be created.
Yes, I agree. Right. Let's move on to our next story. Let's talk about this AI Act amendment
within the EU that's proposed, which should be clear, not passed. Tell us about this,
Martin.
Yeah. So at the end of last week, two European Parliament committees published the latest
version of the EU AI Act, which we have discussed a few times in recent episodes. And there
were some big amendments really, because they'd received a lot of feedback from the industry
and from the community at large. And there were, I would say four main takeaways. There's
a really good article that will pop in the show notes from Lexology, which has done top
10 takeaways, which we'll make sure we share. But in terms of the, I think the key implications
that business owners and marketers in the EU need to be aware of. First of all, that
there are higher costs and obligations for companies developing or using AI in the EU.
These obligations in terms of reporting and disclosures are going to be increased. And
in fact, actually the penalties for non-compliance are actually greater than GDPR. So the GDPR
data breach and non-compliance fines were up to 4% of global annual turnover. This was
4%, sorry, this was 6% and I think it's being increased to 7%, I understand. So yeah, the
costs are quite big. There's a new definition of AI in there. So the EU has adopted the
OECD definition of AI, which is very much more focused on machine learning and deep
learning networks. It was previously a somewhat overly broad range of software applications
that were falling under the umbrella of AI, which software developers were not too pleased
with as you can well imagine. One thing that is new is that they've really increased the
rights for EU consumers. The rules as it were, or the proposed legislation didn't really
talk about individuals and how individuals were affected. Whereas now in this amendment,
individuals have the right to lodge complaints with supervisory authorities and to request
explanations of decisions made by high-risk AI systems. That's a key part of this legislation
as well. The EU is taking a risk-based approach to regulation. So they're basically saying,
we are going to regulate AI systems based on the level of harm that they could cause.
Things that are related to healthcare or policing, these are the things that they're really going
to clamp down on. Foundation models such as GPT-4 and the big generative AI foundation
models, these are being regulated, but they are not going to be classed as high-risk.
So that's quite a positive thing for us to recognise is that they're not going to be
classed as high-risk systems. However, this increased regulation around them does have
some restrictions and requirements for the model trainers, the companies creating these
models around data governments. They've got to have increased technical documentation
and there are going to be quality management systems and requirements to disclose things
like the amount of copyright information that was used in the training of the models. So
the companies have to be much more aware of all of that in disclosing various parts of
the model and the use cases and things like that.
One other observation was that there are more obligations for deployers. Now this is different
from the company that's creating an AI model. This is someone that is deploying a model.
If you're building on top of a foundational model, this would, as I understand it, make
you a deployer.
Like a Jasper or a copy AI or a Go Charlie or anything that's using open AI as its back
end basically.
Yeah, exactly. And if you're deploying somebody else's model, so it's not just the foundation
of models, any kind of AI model, you're building on AWS using one of their models, you are
a deployer. And the deployers themselves now face increased compliance obligations. Now
this includes conducting a fundamental rights impact assessment and providing certain information
to individuals affected by high risk AI systems.
Now you might be saying, well, what does that mean? What are fundamental rights impact assessments?
Now in GDPR, there's a requirement to have a data impact assessment, which is all around,
I probably haven't got the terminology right there, but if you're using people's data,
you have to do an impact assessment about what would happen if there was a data breach
and you have to give high risks and what are you doing to mitigate the risks in high risk
situations and low risk situations? What have you got in place to cover those kinds of things?
Now this is a fundamental rights. This isn't data rights. This is fundamental rights impact
assessment. So what are fundamental rights? It's difficult to kind of really pin down.
And there's a few EU papers that cover this topic. I've found one from December, 2022
that goes into this and it identifies things like privacy rights. So rights to personal
autonomy, the sanctity of the home, data protection does actually fall under that. Things like
expressional rights. So press freedom, commercial expression, right to assembly, right to vote,
procedural rights. So the right to access a court, the right to a fair trial, equality
rights, which will be things like rights to equal application of the law to everyone to
whom the law applies. And then socioeconomic rights. So equal access to healthcare, equal
access to affordable housing, equal access to education, equal access to social benefits.
These are fundamental rights as they are relevant in an AI context. So you as an organisation
that is thinking of deploying any AI in your product has to be aware of that. And you have
to think about, you're going to have to start thinking about a fundamental rights impact
assessment. Because if your product might be used for insurance, let's say you're doing
healthcare insurance and it's assessing risk, that's going to be a really, that's going
to be quite a high risk deployment of AI. If you're using generative AI, if you're Jasper,
for instance, and you've got your open AI and various other models powered, powering
your product and your product helps people write better subject lines for email marketing
and things like that, that's relatively low risk, isn't it? The fundamental rights impact
is going to be very low. You're not probably going to have to report that, create an extensive
report on that. So yeah, I think that's a big consideration for business owners and
marketers building with AI. Generally speaking, I think this is a good thing. This is the
world's first piece of AI regulation. And as you mentioned, Sam Altman has been at the
Senate this week, speaking to the senators in the US about AI regulation. The EU is now
actually kind of leading the way. What are your thoughts on this?
Yeah, it's an interesting one. Firstly, I'm glad I have you here, Martin, because when
these changes are made, my brain struggles with all of the ins and outs of this information
needs. So hopefully this, I'm sure it's very useful for all our listeners, but it's even
just useful for me to hear you describe it, because then I understand it better. I think
as a marketer, I think, A, I can see a lot of products and services getting AI augmented.
And so product managers and marketers need to be aware of what's going on inside their
products. Even if it's for things like crisis comms, right? If you're in a comms team and
you need to have a plan in place for how you're going to deal with any issues that come up
with how your AI driven tool is now no longer meeting the requirements of this legislation,
assuming it goes through. I think more broadly, if I'm a marketer, one of the key questions
I'm asking myself and one of the key questions I field is what tools should we use? How should
we roll them out? That type of thing. I think it's a really difficult question to answer.
We've talked about it many times on the podcast and it's a temptation to wait for big companies
to just roll out broad tools like Google in its workplace. And it's perhaps like Google
docs and Gmail, et cetera, and Microsoft copilot, just because there's a sort of trust you have
in those organizations that it's going to make it easy to roll out and train. But if
not, you're investing in tools that you have to embed in your organization. You have to
make them a part of your processes. You have to train your team on them. And then what
if this legislation impacts one of your supplies in a way that means that they can no longer
provide the tool or they can, but the costs of meeting the requirements of this and other
legislation quadruples the cost of it, right? Or the functionality changes because there's
certain aspects of the tool that they just can't even offer anymore until this stuff
is figured out. So there's a bit of a wait and see mindset that I see a lot of people
starting to take in terms of crumbs. I want to start rolling some of these tools out in
my organization, but what if some of those things happen? And of course it's legislation
like these that could kickstart shutdowns and pauses and functionality changes and et
cetera.
So we're already seeing the EU's moves in this domain have an impact, right? So Bard,
for instance, has different functionality in the rest of the world than it does in the
EU. And it has been speculated that this is a bit of a, you know, FU to the EU from Google
to say that, you know, we're bringing out this cool new tech and you can't have it because
we can't make it comply with your products and you know, you're going to be left wanting
whether that is the case or not, who knows? There, you know, there is functionality, the
plugins that you get in Bard in the US and the rest of the world are not available to
people in the EU at the moment.
Just for clarity, the plugins in Bard or the plugins in ChatGPT?
Plugins in Bard.
Yeah, the extensions in Bard. Yeah.
Cool. I know that there's been...
I say plugins, the extensions, the additional features, the extended capabilities.
And you just can't get them. Yeah, yeah. I'd noticed that as well and saw some stories.
Attached to this as well is just thinking about as a marketer or as a business owner,
as anybody working in this space, one thing to be aware of is they have reduced the time
for compliance. There was originally a three year time scale to implement this, which companies
were saying was already too short and they've reduced it from three years to two years.
So if it was too short and you were whinging, better spend less time whinging and more time
acting because that timeline is ticking.
Oh. Although what the world would look like in three or two years, given the pace of change,
is another interesting question, I would say.
It is. There's one additional point to this, though, that I just want to throw in. There
was a story in The Guardian today. So Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is out in Japan doing
his tour, doing a media press tour while he prepares for the G7 meeting. And when asked
about AI, he said that the UK will lead on guardrails to limit the dangers of AI, which
is a stark contrast to the UK government's position in March, where they said they were
going to take a laissez faire approach to AI regulation, enable to encourage and foster
innovation and whatnot. But it turns out when a letter is written by senior people in the
world of AI saying, well, we need to consider this, the UK government suddenly sits up and
listens. I would suggest they probably don't know their arse from their elbow in this area,
but what do I know?
They certainly seem a little confused, depending on who you ask, I guess. But I'm sure we'll
see how that plays out over time. It has a bit of an in the thick of it, yes, Minister,
feel that quote. For those of you that are not familiar with those very British sitcoms,
they lampoon the inner workings of the UK government and in effect make it look like
no one in the government knows what they're doing, which again is not what we're saying
here, but certainly an interesting parallel. Right. Thank you for that, Martin. That's
super helpful. Right. Last detailed story of the week is that we're going to have a
brief discussion about chat GPT plugins. So we've talked quite a lot about these over
the last couple of weeks, maybe month or two since they were announced, but it was pretty
hard to get access to them. But this week, the lovely folks at OpenAI have been rolling
them out to all of their users. Martin got access before me, which just annoyed me immensely
and I didn't get out of bed for two days, but I also have access now, so I am joyous
again. If you are interested in having a play with these, you can access them if you have
chat GPT. I'm guessing you have to have plus. We've both got plus, Martin. Yeah. It does
require plus. Yeah. Yeah. I figured it might. So if you've got plus, you can go into your
settings and you'll see some new options in there that allow you to turn on the plugins
beta and then you'll be able to start leveraging the plugins when you're searching. It changes
the way that you select the model you're using at the top and that's where you can add the
plugins. There are, I think, nearly a hundred from my quick scan through of plugins with
lots of different use cases at this point that you can have a play with. We did see
a really interesting article from the folks over at AI Marketing School where they actually
took us through three really cool use cases using chat GPT plugins for marketing. So just
to briefly describe what they talked about in their newsletter, which is well worth signing
up to, they used the plugin called Video Insights to be able to turn videos into articles. So
you have to install the Video Insights plugin and then you can go to YouTube. You can search
for videos on a particular topic and then you can paste the URLs of those videos and
it doesn't have to be one. It could be multiple ones and then ask chat GPT to write a blog
post or an article or some sort of summary based on what the tool was able to pull out
of those videos. And as the team say, it's not perfect, but it can give you a pretty
decent first draft and some ideas they suggest things like turning a webinar into articles,
social media posts and those types of things. They make a note and we would massively second
this. I think this is true of anything you do with Genitive AI. Double check the outputs,
make sure it hasn't hallucinated in the middle of what I was doing, make sure it hasn't pulled
in some materials from elsewhere that you didn't want it to pull in and all that good
stuff. The second use case they talk about, which is pretty cool, is connecting it with
Zapier, Zapier, which basically allows you to connect chat GPT to any other app. So it's
a bit like for Zapier users, Zapier is the great connector, right? It allows you to have
a piece of data that's in one app, trigger an action in another app. So an example might
be when a new contact appears in my CRM, add their details to a row in a Google Sheet as
an example. But now with chat GPT, you can access Zapier's capabilities within the interface.
So as they say in the newsletter, you can create emails or Slack messages and send them
straight without leaving the interface. You can send data directly from chat GPT to other
tools like Google Sheets and Notion and those types of things. And you can push things like
if you're doing a brainstorm and asking chat GPT for headline ideas or article outlines,
those types of things, you can push them straight into a Google Doc. So that's pretty interesting.
I think people will have to figure out where that really saves them time versus just like
copy pasting stuff over themselves. But I think it's pretty interesting one. And then
the last one that I think I probably like the most and definitely want to go and have
a play with is the WebPilot plugin. So in this, they give an example of how you could
use it to SEO, optimize your content by in essence, getting it to create an SEO strategy
to outrank your competitors. So in the example that they gave, they asked it to scrape the
top five search engine results for the keyword using AI for marketing and give me a detailed
SEO strategy to help me outcompete them. For example, include exact keyword density, comprehensive
h2 outline for an article that contains everything these articles touch upon, plus anything that
you feel is missing that they should have touched upon that will help me rank highly
for this keyword. And it's too long and laborious for me to read the output to you. But it's
pretty darn impressive in terms of touching on the suggested keyword density, suggesting
a really effective outline for the article, highlighting a few gaps that the top ranking
pages don't focus on. And when I was seeing this example, it reminded me of when you took
us through tool of the week, a month or two ago, Market Muse, Martin, and it's for obvious
reasons, nowhere near as usable and sophisticated as Market Muse. But as a tool, you can, in
essence, as I understand it, use for free within the ChatGPT interface, although we
should check because you might have to have a login for WebPilot as well, I can imagine.
But we can look into that.
I've tried that plugin and there's no restriction on it as far as I can see.
Lovely stuff. So three pretty cool applications there of plugins and many more to come, I'm
sure. So go and have a play with those. And if you come up with anything else, cool. Of
course, we would love to hear about it. We've also been playing with it a bit ourselves.
You've been playing with it, how many, Martin, what have you been up to?
So there was, as well as the actual plugins, they also announced this week the web browsing
capability in beta itself. So whereas there is WebPilot, which is a plugin, ChatGPT now
has its own web browsing capability that isn't a plugin, but does need turning on in the
same settings section. So I thought I would, I don't know if I've told you, but Derby County
got knocked out of, well, didn't get into the playoffs this year. So our season ended
early. And as such, I'm left looking for Derby County news that is, you know, non-match day
related, things like player transfers and such like that. So typically trying to find
any news around that requires crawling the forums, browsing Twitter. And I thought, I
can't be bothered with any of that. So instead I will ask the web browsing functionality
on ChatGPT to tell me, gather any latest transfer rumours for my beloved Derby County. And it
did exactly that. It went out and crawled the web and brought back a really good summary
actually. So it said Derby County has been linked with several players recently, and
then it gives me one, two, three, four, five players that we've been linked with. And with
each one, it tells me who they are and a kind of summary of the position and the news around
them. Now, the interesting thing was with this, each one of those stories, and you get
this with the web browsing model of ChatGPT, but not with WebPilot. So it actually links
you to the story. With WebPilot, I don't remember actually having links to the stories.
So I read these stories, I read this and then clicked on one of the links and it took me
through to this football transfer rumour website. And actually I've posted a screenshot of it
on Twitter, if you want to check it out. And the interface on this website was atrocious.
It was, there were so many adverts. I was being pelted with adverts left, right and
centre. There is literally on my screen about four lines of copy and the rest of the screen
is adverts overlaid with adverts with more adverts overlaid on those. It's an absolute
mess of a user experience. Yet I avoided all of that using this web browsing feature that
just went on, did the crawling for me and brought the results back. And it made me think,
oh, that's going to impact a lot of publishers.
I mean, there's so many great things in that. Firstly, I get so many messages, people ask
me what's going on with Derby County. Finally, they have the information that they need.
So thank you, Martin. If you looked at our subscriber base, about half of them are Derby
County fans and then the other half are marketers interested in AI. The other thing is I suspect
these tools may still be somewhat prone to hallucination. I think it's unlikely that
you're going to be signing Messi and Ronaldo. I know that's what it said in the output mind,
but you should definitely double check the sources on those. And yes, as we've talked
about before, how will people access information on the web as these tools become the mainstay
of how we do things on our computers and on our phones and I guess eventually in VR and
AR. And yeah, if you can just get the information easier and you don't have to fight pop up
central you do as well. Right. So yeah, absolutely fascinating. I think one of the things I've
noticed from playing with the tool and I found myself sort of replicating some of the things
you talked about a couple of weeks ago, Martin. So I've made the move to edge now and I'm
in my sidebar. I've got Bing, I've got Track GPT and I've got Bard and I can basically
very quickly run the same query through all three tools. And whilst I love the power that
you get with the plugins, my goodness, it is slow. It is significantly slower than the
other tools. And so when I need an answer quickly, I'm going to Bing or to Bard. And
if I want to do something where I feel like the request is kind of a bit complicated or
taps into one of those more power, not more powerful, but more non browser based plugins,
then I'll push it through Chat GPT. So this may be the first indicator at least for me
of how as these tools mature, a lot of the things that underpin good UX as users, we're
going to probably have to be giving them a little bit less license, right? Like if it's
slow, like how when web pages that you load are slow, you're like, right, I haven't got
eight seconds to wait for this to load. I'm going to go just read a different source instead.
And we may just see that start to differentiate which tool you go to maybe in general or for
different use cases like I've described. The other thing is I think it will highlight some
of the interesting and powerful work that's happening in the open source community at
the moment, trying to figure out how do you create a large language model that can deliver
quality outputs at GPT four level, but with a much smaller model trained with much fewer
parameters and much simpler weightings and all those other things, the likes of which
would be fast. And as we've talked about previously, fast enough to run natively on a phone or
even on as some people have shown on something like Raspberry Pi. And that need for speed
is actually probably not just going to be something the open source community thinks
is a cool experiment. And I'm sure they're not the only people who think that obviously,
but actually could end up being quite a commercial driver in terms of reducing the costs and
computation required to offer these tools, but just making a great fast user experience.
Yeah. What's this space for when Apple launches? Indeed. I can't wait because the conference
is in June and I want to see this VR headset they've been toiling away on to see if it's
the car crash that some stories will tell you that everybody inside Apple thinks this
is a terrible idea and we should never launch it or a few of the stories that are popping
up that are suggesting that it might actually be quite cool, including the founder of Oculus
who went on Twitter and basically implied it's absolutely awesome. So, oh, can't wait
to see. Anyway, I digress and we need to respect our lovely list this time. So we'll move on.
Last couple of bits and pieces then everyone. First of all, we are going to hear, for all
of us, as I talked about at the beginning, Liam Lally, who is a PPC expert. For those
of you who haven't listened to last week's episode yet, we were talking, Martin and I,
about Meta releasing some AI enabled tools to help advertisers get better results and
create new ad formats automatically and all this type of stuff. And that got us into a
discussion about the pros and cons of using automation in your pay-per-click advertising
strategy. And the different perspectives that people have in the market, especially PPC
specialists about the power of AI versus automation versus actually those tools just being something
that Google and Meta can use to get you to spend more money, basically. So we had a really
good debate about that. And then we invited other experts who probably know more about
it than we do to share their thoughts. And that is what Liam did. So we're going to go
to Liam in a minute. I think Martin and I were left with the idea that automation could
be powerful, but only in the hands of an expert and the human in the loop and someone managing
this process was critical. And then I think Liam's done a really fantastic job, a job
of giving us some deeper insights there and really giving us a feel for where he feels
automation sits and what to watch out for. So over to you, Liam.
Hi, it's Liam from Saddle. I'm a PPC manager. I was listening to your discussion about the
algorithmic ad managers. I think you were talking about Firms Max and Advantage Plus.
And I thought I would just chip in because I've got quite a few thoughts on this one.
So with regards to Performance Max, I think it was, I can remember it wasn't the thing
that they mentioned. They thought it was the future of advertising for some businesses.
One of the issues that some of us have got that have been doing this is that there is
no denying that sometimes we turn a shopping campaign into a Performance Max campaign in
the same way as previously we would have gone from a shopping campaign to what used to be
called a smart shopping campaign. And they will perform, well, not all of them, but I
think my caveat with some of this is the data, you have to have a huge amount of data for
this to work out really well. And I think some of the people that kind of get on and
say this is what you should be doing all the time and you should be, or to apply in all
recommendations given to you by all of these platforms. I think if you're a huge brand
with huge budgets, I think you can get away with it because I think that that data is
collected quicker. I think for SMEs and smaller businesses, I think that there has to be more
hesitation over that. And I'll come on to that in a second. So for example, if we put
some Performance Max campaigns together for our clients, then we have, and this is coming
in, so in theory we have no control over things like branded searches. So people physically
looking for the client anyway, shopping app comes up, they click on that, they go through
and they buy. Or if this is Performance Max, then clicking on a display ad or a video clip
or whatever it is where they've decided to put it. Now you can, or you're beginning to
have the ability to be able to exclude branded searches. So it'll be interesting to see how
Performance Max changes, but just to put it into context, I just want to give you some
figures because I work on figures. So if I said we have a client that's just spent 22
grand in the last 30 days and they've had a conversion value of 1,054, 1,000, a million,
1,000,000 pounds and 54,966 pounds worth of revenue. That sounds amazing. That sounds
like it is amazing. It's fantastic. If I then turn around and say they've got some branded
search ads that they can then monitor and make sure what's going on with them. And within
all of those totals that I've just given you, they've spent 185 pound on their branded ads
and they've had 243,000 pounds worth of sales. So my issue with Performance Max isn't necessarily
the AI and all the other stuff around it. It's the fact that so much is hidden and we're
not able to actually see what impact those, because if you think of some of those other
campaigns, we've then got every single campaign could be looking like it's amazing because
it's actually triggering for branded. And when you look at those kinds of figures, then
it's very easy to see how the final results can be warped. My final point on machine learning
and AI and things like that in Google, often people are, I don't want to say recommended,
but they're suggested to them that they will turn on Google's auto apply recommendations.
And when I have seen companies do this, generally everything goes south. Now, again, I think
some of this is down to huge amounts of data. I think some of this could be down to set
up a little bit, but actually if I look at some of the campaigns, we've run across multiple
clients. So we're talking 100, 100 plus clients. When we've implemented some of the automated
smart bidding as they would call it, it's done the polar opposite of what you wanted
it to do. And the response that we've got back has been, oh, you should let it run for
longer. And I think one of the issues for a lot of SMEs is we don't have budgets to
be able to run something for six months to see if it works. It tends to be far shorter
periods. So does performance max work? Yes, certainly looks like it works in some cases.
I've also had clients where it hasn't worked at all. It seems to get, it seems to go downhill
very quickly when it hasn't got enough conversions coming through. So I've seen campaigns literally
fall over cliff and take three months to get back online. With it all, I'm worried about
the transparency of it. And therefore we've always had the transparency. And I think when
you look at P max for Google, if you look at advantage plus to an extent for Facebook,
then we'll get into a point where we're getting less and less visibility and with less and
less visibility, that worries me. So a really big thing. Thanks there to you,
Liam, for sharing that with us. If you're a listener to the podcast and we touch on
a topic that you're an expert in or something that you're passionate about and you want
to come on, please let us know. We'd love to have you on. You can come in and join our
conversation like me and Martin are having today. You can record an audio snippet and
send it to us. However you want to do it. We would love to hear from you.
Right. Last little bit. We're going to look at tool of the week and tool of the week this
week is Jenny and Martin, you've been having a play with this voice generation tool. Tell
us what you've learned. So Jenny is a tool from a company called Lovoo, L-O-V-O, Lovoo.ai
and it is, as you've suggested, a voice generation tool, hence the name Jenny. Jenny is in generative,
so it's G-E-N-N-Y and it's a really interesting interface. When you see it for the first time
you go, wow, this is a proper audio editing system. Now the way that it works is that
you can input your text from a script, it breaks it down into paragraphs for you and
then you can go through your script, selecting each section and assigning one of the voices
to it. And there are many, many voices to choose from, more than I care to count actually.
Then you've got voices from all over the world and they're tagged by things like English
American, English GB, then they've got things like young adult, education, entertainment,
marketing, all these different use cases are in the mix. If you want something from a global
or if you want a global voice, international voice, you've got that as well. You can actually
look at different languages, everything from Afrikaans right down to Welsh and Zulu and
Uzbek and everything in between. You can choose the age range of the speaker. So it's got
a lot of customization in there. In fact, you can even customize things like pronunciation.
So if there's a word that is written in your script, it just sounds weird when you generate
it, you can actually type in a new pronunciation for that word and then every time the word
appears in the script, the AI will know to say it in the correct way. There's more controls
in this as well. So we were playing around and you can touch on things like emphasis
on a particular word. You can increase the speed at which one of the sentences or paragraphs
is spoken and you can even change the pitch as well. And the good thing is that you can
actually do it with multiple speakers. So you don't just have to have one speaker throughout
just creating one voice. So you can run it as a dialogue as well, which makes it quite
a powerful tool to play with actually. It's not just a very static one tone, one voice
over, which I think that's quite a few tools out there that will do one single voice if
you give it some text. I think this is a real differentiator. In fact, the audio editing
on here will allow you to add sound effects and background tracks as well. So it does
have some more powerful audio editing capabilities beyond that as well. In terms of use cases,
you can use it for anything like podcasts. For instance, I imagine podcasters might want
to do audio intros and outros and things like that. I actually was, I've had the subscription
to this for a while. I don't really use it that often, but I was reminded of it when
I went to a client's office the other day and someone in the office mentioned that they
needed to re-record the telephone message on their, you know, press one for such and
such press two for such, such. Apparently there were some new options or something they
needed to re-record it. And it was one of those where no one in the office wanted to
do it. Everyone was like, I'm not really got the voice for it. And I thought, oh, you could
use, you could use this tool. And I showed off Jenny to them for that particular use
case. So we've actually got an example of it. Hopefully this comes through okay. I'm
sure it will, because if, if it doesn't work in this live presentation version, Paul will
edit it in, I'm sure. But this is a version, it's about a minute long, where I got Google's
Bard to write a script talking about generative AI and audio generative AI specifically. And
we're going to hear that in two different voices now.
Hello everyone. My name is Bard and I'm a large language model from Google AI. I am
here today to talk to you about generative AI and specifically about audio generation.
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content such as text,
images and music. Audio generation is a specific type of generative AI that can create new
audio content. Audio generation can be used for a variety of purposes, such as creating
music, audio books and podcasts. Really interesting stuff there, Ma, compared to some of the other
tools we've played with, some of the cadence of speech is so much more natural. When the
second speaker says text, images and music, right, which is much more like a human would
say like a human presenter on a radio show versus like text, images and music without
any sort of variance. And yet in the next sentence, she says generative AI in a slightly
weird way that a human would never do. So we're getting so much closer to something
that sounds straight off the bat like a human could have done it with just a few more still
a couple of telltales in there that it's AI generated.
Yeah. And I would say actually in Jenny's defense there, we knock this up in seconds
and you can edit the script to get those little details just right. This was basically zero
editing so we could change the pronunciation of AI, we could add a pause. There are quite
like I say some quite impressive bits of fine tuning control on there.
Pretty cool. Yeah, I think as regular listeners will know when we put together the podcast,
we had the intros and the outros generated by AI. So the lovely person who speaks at
the beginning and at the end is not a real person, I'm afraid. But we had very little
control in the tool we used at the time. I can't remember what it was to control cadence
and how it was pronounced. So this is a really interesting step in terms of greater sophistication.
I can see that being super valuable when you really want to invest quite a lot of time
and effort into getting it just right. And hopefully the tools will get better at predicting
what sort of changes someone would make in order to get that effect. If you were going
to do this at scale and you're just creating quite a lot of content, like if you wanted
someone to narrate every one of your blog posts on your website so that those who were
visually impaired could listen to them or if people who were on the go wanted to listen
to your content instead of read it, I'm sure that you probably wouldn't get the ROI of
going through and absolutely making sure every single one of those was on the nose. But actually
can still do a pretty good job regardless. And certainly very legible is the wrong word,
I guess. Very easy to understand. There's no parts there where you didn't really realize
what the person was saying. And I've got an ebook reader on my phone that has a text to
speech synthesis built into it that just used the standard Google or Samsung one. And you
can't really listen to a book like it's an audio book, right? It's a bit jarring. And
every now and again, you can't quite understand because two sentences get smashed together
or a word gets completely mispronounced. And it would sound like this is going to overcome
quite a lot of those issues for people looking to make it so that their content can be listened
to instead of just read. Cool. So that was Tool of the Week this week. Thank you, Martin,
for telling us about Jenny. If you're interested in synthesizing audio, please do let us know.
We hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. If you have, please subscribe. Tell your marketing
friends to subscribe as well. If you've got any thoughts on anything we've discussed or
if you want to come on the podcast or send us a snippet, hit us up on the LinkedIn or
the Twitters. Our Twitter handle is AIMarketingPod or one word. Hurrah! We got the Twitter handle
right first time and I promise you, dear listener, that's not because Martin is screen sharing
and showing me Twitter as I read that out. Yeah, he actually is, but it's nice to get
it right for once. We would love to hear from you. Thanks very much for joining us again
and we'll speak to you all soon, I'm sure. Thank you, Martin. Cheers, Paul. See you next
week and thanks for listening, everyone. Bye bye. 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.