I asked ChatGPT, “Can generative AI replace the job of a marketing professional?”
It responded:
“Generative AI has the potential to assist and enhance the work of marketing professionals, but it is unlikely to completely replace them. Marketing involves a wide range of activities that require human creativity, strategic thinking, and understanding of consumer behavior, which are challenging for AI systems to replicate fully.”
Well thank goodness.
Generative AI is an open source tool that’s able to sift through mass amounts of existing data and identify patterns to generate new, original content. A lot of creative employees, like marketing professionals and the WGA writers still on the picket lines, are worried about AI taking over their jobs. While there are legitimate concerns being raised about businesses using AI to replace creative professions, we say that no amount of programming can replace the creative ingenuity of the human mind. But we can use AI to increase the efficiency of our work, allowing us to focus on the creative aspects that make our clients shine.
Here are some of the ways our marketing team has been creatively using AI tools.
Getting Quick Results for Research
One of our core values at CONNECTIVE is to “go deep.” We spend a lot of time researching trending topics, recent news and data-driven reports in our clients’ industries to ensure the content we create is relevant and accurate. Rather than spending hours searching through Google results, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have made the research process more efficient for a few members of our team.
As a copywriter, I have asked ChatGPT specific questions about a topic to build out articles or website content. It’s so helpful to get a direct answer immediately. However, it’s also incredibly important to find a strong source to back up any answers you get from an AI tool, since we can’t yet verify how credible the sources are that systems like ChatGPT are pulling from.
Fitting the Context of Content
While we will never use generative AI to write content – which puts you at risk of plagiarizing as well as having copy that lacks any of your brand personality – there are a few tools that support the creative work of copywriters, especially when it comes to specific rules or guidelines we have to follow for a piece.
For example, the CONNECTIVE Agency follows AP style for our content, which includes specific spelling and grammar rules. If I want to make sure I’m writing an abbreviation in the appropriate format, I can quickly confirm with ChatGPT. There are also circumstances where we need to work within a limiting character count. I can ask ChatGPT to condense my copy to a certain number of words, then quickly edit the copy to match the brand voice.
Filling in the Gaps of Design
No AI tool will be able to replicate the beautiful art that our designers create. However, our designers have found generative AI tools that have expanded the possibilities of what we can do with photography.
Did your team take a nearly perfect group photo at an event, but one person’s eyes are closed? There is a generative fill tool that can “unblink” their eyes. We’ve also found a tool that can realistically expand the background of an image. So if a photo is a little too tight or doesn’t meet the measurement requirements for a social graphic, we’re able to fill in that extra space as though the photo was taken from a wider lens.
Original Image:
Image with Generated Background:
Cruz Torres, one of our senior graphic designers, shared his thoughts on AI for design: “Before this feature, we’ve been limited on how far we can take design with client-provided photos – always designing around the photo as opposed to designing with the photo. For example, it’s always been a challenge to crop certain photos for perfect positioning when designing for social media. It might lack negative space for copy or maybe a vertical photo is provided but you’re designing a landscape sized image. With AI, we can now fill in for those gaps without jumping through major design hurdles and the results are often seamless and fast.”
While a designer may have been able to solve these problems with their own photo editing skills in a few hours, generative AI has made it possible in just minutes.
Saving Time for Development
When there is even the smallest of errors in code, it can take a developer hours and hours to search every line to find and correct it. AI tools have enabled our developers to feed code into a program that can quickly detect bugs based on what doesn’t fit the expected pattern. This is a huge time saver that helps us keep everything functioning smoothly for our clients.
One of our web developers, Hayat Ibrahim, shared about her experience using AI tools: “ChatGPT is a great additional tool to fix bugs in coding. I sometimes feed it a snippet of code to find an error or to make it accessible and it does just that. While it does not replace human programmers, it can significantly improve productivity and coding accuracy.”
Hayat also says that she emphasizes using any AI tool with security and confidentiality in mind. It’s very important for developers using tools like this to remove the company name or any other proprietary data from the code before feeding it into the system. Open source AI is not currently regulated and we do not know what info is being stored and who has access to it.
Working Smarter with AI
We aren’t worried about AI taking over creative professions any time soon, and we’re not afraid to use these free tools to our advantage! Our team is constantly looking for innovative solutions to produce the best possible marketing content and design for our clients, and we’re excited to have easy access to advanced technology that empowers us to focus more on the creative aspects of our work.
Check out more of the creative work CONNECTIVE is doing by following us on our social channels: LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.
