By Jasmin Bedir, CEO at Innocean
Another week, another article with my thoughts on the impact of AI on our industry.
I’ve had many chats with friends and peers casually over the past couple of months and increasingly what I see is fear and apathy, which are intrinsically linked.
The general consensus is that a small number of people (or shall I say tech and venture cap bros) have a lot to gain, whilst a lot of actual humans increasingly have a hell of a lot to lose: From jobs, to profit margins. But it also gets fairly personal very quickly when we consider our personal lives, our children and the concept of identity. It feels pretty much existential right now.
The idea that OpenAI would be utilised and commercialised for AI porn isn’t far-fetched in a world where 30 million users have downloaded an AI companion to cope with their loneliness. And even if you’re not lonely, but currently are on a dating app, beware of the good-looking ad exec from Darlinghurst – he or she may indeed be generated by AI and wants to sell you some crypto.
But I digress. Let me bring it back to our industry. Anyone that read this AFR article is right in asking the question of whether this sounds eerily familiar to what’s going on in our industry.
This week, we soft-launched our own custom GPT as one of our latest pilots – it contains an entire account history, its presentations as well as brand guidelines, queryable of course. This is one result of the work we have done since last June with an AI advisor. I shall report back on how this is developing, but of course, the aim is to automate menial tasks and enable our staff to focus on what matters most – creating valuable work for our clients.
But the conversations I see play out publicly in our industry, are very much limited to an ad tech/third party and efficiency level in a procurement context. I don’t see any public conversations around future job titles, what this means for our creative departments and content creators, photographers, producers?
I seriously worry that nobody wants to have THAT conversation. It’s a bit like saying the quiet part out loud, I feel. But silence isn’t going to solve anything for us right now.
So my question is, is anybody listening? If so, come and find me here and tell me about your industry experience so far (Chatham House rules apply).
If I don’t hear from you I may need to let the lovely Mediaweek people know that they need to find a better audience. Or replace me with AI.
See Also: Jasmin Bedir: What we do in the shadows
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Top Image: Jasmin Bedir