It’s all the rage. But is it really?
An extra set of hands means extra help, right? Wrong. The selling point of artificial intelligence (AI) is that it’s a tool to provide additional capacity at the fraction of a cost of another person. In my experience, AI marketing tools are comparable in skill and ability to an intern who is fresh on the job.
Here are the obvious faults that no level of programming can overcome:
- AI can’t go into the field to collect content
- AI can’t interpret emotion well, and struggles to convey tone
- AI is based on binary programming, not creativity
The best marketers excel at time in the field, on-site with clients to collect content, brainstorm, and showcase work. Yes, you can install devices that listen in a store or office and attempt to capture the brand voice, but that isn’t the same as a marketer visiting. Plus, no level of AI is ever going to be capable of traveling somewhere and capturing moments to tell a story.
As an emotional being, AI is far off the mark. This becomes obvious when you ask these tools to change the tone or voice. The machines don’t know how to respond. Even worse, these tools have a knack for piecing together strange sentences that seem foreign to the marketing goals. I often wonder why higher education has struggled with detecting AI. I can pick up something written by AI almost immediately — it feels… uncomfortable.
Marketing is all about creativity. As much of my day is spent creating content as it is consuming content. I draw inspiration from the physical and digital world around me. Did I just see a cool video on TikTok? Yeah. And I immediately think “how can I draw a parallel to one of the brands I’m working on to amplify the content?” AI isn’t yet able to comb through content the same way and synthesize.
And this is why I recognize AI’s marketing abilities on par with an intern who is still in school and on one of their first jobs. Sure, they come up with a great idea every so often; however, you’re routinely guiding them through the process and “improving” their work product.
We’re far off from a marketing world dominated by AI. There are tools that can help support creatives and ideate, but the digital program is far from serving up a Madison Ave. marketing firm product.
AI Marketing: Like a Fresh Intern was originally published in Thoughts? for Jersey on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.