While the consensus from the creative community is that ChatGPT is not quite ready to churn out pristine ad copy, that’s not stopping Ryan Reynolds and Mint Mobile from giving it a shot.
In this video, the actor and part owner of the wireless brand is shown describing how he used the AI bot to write a script for the brand.
Watch Mint Mobile’s Ad created with ChatGPT
My Takeaways
With all the hype around ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Dall-E2, Midjourney, many people’s reactions have been to the effect of “AI is replacing humans!” either being with the bliss of replacing someone or the terror of being replaced!
One thing is for sure: Artificial Intelligence may not replace humans in the short term, but it will definitely squeeze mediocre work out of the professional market! Let me explain:
- Humans either overestimate their abilities or do not trust new technologies (I guess both are two sides of the same coin). When I first got into photography, all the “old school” photographers I knew said they would never use auto-focus… now cameras with manual focus are a hobby!
- Technology ends (or redefines) professions but — most often — also creates new ones: staying with the photography analogy, if you go back 150 years, cameras were heavy, and their operators were chemists that had to do the whole thing end-to-end… take pictures, develop film, print, etc. In the process, photography disrupted Portrait Painting. That’s when artists (unable to compete with realistic portraiture of photography) pushed themselves to modern art (think Impressionism, Surrealism, Dada). Then Kodak came around, created the brownie camera (as Jim Kalbach says), and invented photographers as people capturing daily life!
- Technology democratizes some capabilities but usually starts with mediocre results: think of any software you use today… if you look back, you can probably think of a time that you either could do the same thing that the software does “by hand” if you were an expert, or the software allowed you to do things you couldn’t be bothered to learn, or you don’t want to put the time to become an expert on it. Back in my undergrad Graphic Design program, many people thought that just because they knew Photoshop, they could become the new David Carson! So, technology comes along and — if you don’t put effort into it — does it for you, just “good enough” or — let’s face it — mediocre. But, sure, technology won’t replace expert software users because it cannot match their skills… yet!
- And (my last point) it’s just a matter of time before technology separates mediocre from “true artists”: Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns says that those technological advancements may seem small and incremental now, but they are not linear. It’s exponential! If Ryan Reynolds is impressed (or not!) with the ad that ChatGTP wrote, imagine what technology will do five years from now: as more work gets delegated to AI, mediocre human work will get squeezed out of the market!
A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (i.e., a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.
Kurzweil, R., The Law of Accelerating Returns (2001)
