E-I-AI-O
E-I-AI-O, did AI write this or did I? The world may never know. I'm just kidding; these words and bad puns are all from my own brain. AI does seem to be enjoying the center of attention as of late, so I'm going to go ahead and give them a little more time in the limelight.
AI has been around a lot longer than most of us realize, but the difference is that it isn't the type of AI advancement and technologies that we are seeing today. Seriously, one of the first introductions of AI was in the 1950s with Alan Turing. Yes, before you ask, I did have to do some Googling to find the time frame because, though I remember my first introductions to AI technology, I wasn't around in the 1950s. These simple introductions and uses are far different from what we hear about AI doing today, but they had to start somewhere. We've been using it far longer than we realize. Think about if you've ever owned an iPhone. How often have you used Siri to set a reminder or asked her a question? That uses AI technology. If you've ever used any kind of spellchecker or grammar checker, as I often do, that's another type of AI. It's been a part of our everyday lives and is used in more subtle ways than most people realize. It has just really blown up into having its own renaissance era that we get to watch in real time.
You literally can't go from developing a program to play checkers to having AI software solve previously unsolved ciphers—ciphers that have kept the true crime community up at night, mind you. It takes a long time for things to develop and evolve into what we see today, as it should if it is to be credible and long-lasting. It's difficult to trust anything that hasn't had enough data or merit to back up its credibility and effectiveness. That's why it's important to also take anything with AI with a grain of salt. Yes, it is growing rapidly and helpful in so many uses, but not that long ago it was creating incredibly distorted images because it doesn't have that human element. Just because it may know 1,000 elephant facts doesn't mean it can recognize, when given the prompt to generate an image of an elephant, that something is wrong. That's because it likely has all of the elements that are essential in proving that it did in fact generate an image of an elephant. We've seen this occur a lot more with the way that it used phrases to convey messages. While it got across the point, it sometimes didn't make sense. Something that is very important when you are using it in your campaigns to humans and not robots crawling the internet. AI is something that we will continue to see, so we might as well get comfortable with it.
To give you the TL;DR, should you be using AI? Yes, you should, but with a grain of salt, and if you aren't already, you could be putting yourself at a disadvantage. It will continue to develop and evolve, as you should with it. It's never too late to start learning and progressing, as it's still doing! If that's something that you are interested in doing, here at SilverBack Advertising, we like to stay up to date and integrate new methods into our strategies constantly.