Written by Diem-Quynh Do on Digilah (Tech Thought Leadership).
My Bio:
Hi, I am Quynh. I am currently a 3rd year Communication Studies major at Nanyang Technological University. Back in my first year of university, generative AI was largely an unknown topic. Fast forward to the present, it is the central point of every discussion about the use of technology in communication and media. Witnessing this swift change is the motivation for me to reflect on my experience with these tools and ponder the question: Is generative AI the future of my industry?
Read my research article below:
Generative AI (Gen AI) took center stage as the prominent buzzword of 2023. This technology revolutionized every single industry for its capacity to quickly generate various types of content including text, images, audio, and more. Its extraordinary capacities led to significant workforce changes and stood behind some of the major layoffs in the past year. That said, how is Gen AI transforming the advertising landscape, and where does it stand in an industry where it does what it does best – generating text and images?
The buzz around Generative AI
Gen AI first existed in the ’60s century in the form of chatbots. However, it was not until recent years that they became widely accessible and adopted by internet users worldwide. While Gen AI can assist all sectors in their day-to-day tasks, the implication of the current technology, which is to generate various types of media, remains the most relevant in the advertising industry.
In their original forms, text generators stand as a revolutionary tool for communication specialists and advertisers with their ability to churn out ad copy and refine written pieces in no time. Image generators are also widely utilized and proven to be a cost-effective and time-efficient alternative.
But the potential of Gen AI does not stop there. Big players in the tech industries are also bringing generative AI into their products. Adobe Photoshop, the household name for all professional creatives, introduced their AI-powered Generative Fill in early 2023. This feature was widely celebrated, as it helps to significantly reduce the time spent on creating and editing media assets.
Adobe Photoshop Generative Fill (Source: Adobe Support)
Canva, catering to non-professionals, also incorporated AI to swiftly assist users in discovering templates along with the AI image generator and other capabilities.
Canva’s Magic Studio, powered by AI (Source: Canva)
Google also introduced a new Gen AI tool for their Google Performance Max partners. This innovative tool will aid advertisers in asset creation, ad copy generation, and more.
Google’s AI-powered ads tool (Source: Google)
These tech giants saw a trend in advertisers’ habits: a desire for tools that facilitate swift content creation, allowing more time for other meaningful tasks. It is also a strategic move to cut the budget on outsourcing designers and writers and produce content in-house with the help of AI.
The confined box of AI tools
While Gen AI exhibits extraordinary capabilities, it fundamentally remains a product crafted by humans and acquires knowledge through the datasets fed into the system. Therefore, its generating capacity is limited by what is available in the training dataset.
A prominent example is a trend that blew up on TikTok. Taking advantage of the new image-generative feature of ChatGPT, users create prompts that ask AI to generate different sets of images. All went well until a user took a step further and asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a hamburger without cheese. To our surprise, AI failed at this simple task despite the creator’s effort to rephrase and work around the instruction.
The user is asking AI to create a hamburger without cheese (Video: https://www.tiktok.com/@teddywang86/video/7315228986072681733)
The internet community went wild, with many joking about how “they said AI will take over the world”. But what is left after a good laugh is the acknowledgment that AI’s capacity is limited. As most hamburgers in the training dataset have cheese, AI faces difficulty creating one without it.
Generally, Gen AI tools’ capability is limited by specific tasks assigned to them and the quality of the data used for their training. They can only perform certain tasks or only have the knowledge up until when it was trained. Those who use Gen AI in their work must have a good understanding of the limits of this technology, use it to assist only in relevant tasks, and double-check the quality of the work.
How far is AI from us?
Just as advertising professionals must undergo training and years of experience to excel at their job, Gen AI also requires training to adapt to the specific tasks that it is assigned. It is undoubted that with enough time and investment, Gen AI will become even better at producing results and catering to specific industries, including advertising.
But in this specific case, the learning curve might be steeper for AI than it is for humans. The supporting arguments often center around two key aspects: flexibility and originality.
Text AI generators, most prominently ChatGPT, are known for their limited flexibility in writing. While they can be instructed to adopt different styles, some users remain unsatisfied or frustrated as the result does not precisely meet their expectations.
A simple instruction to ‘energize’ a piece of text may return a copy that is oversaturated with emojis and buzzwords. The absence of ‘empathy’ in current AI technology also hinders their ability to produce written pieces that effectively address the intricacies and nuances of communication tasks.
The conversation surrounding originality often involves copyright infringement. This concern originated from the fact that third-party material might have been used in the process without permission. While referencing past artworks is a common practice in the creative industry, the added touch of human creativity somewhat mitigates these concerns.
To conclude, the fact that Gen AI does not seem to have ‘creativity’ on its own will continue to pose concerns about its range of capabilities and the originality of the product created. Yet, Gen AI remains a powerful tool that can elevate human creativity by offering new ideas and bringing in new thought dimensions.
Most asked questions
Do AI tools have a confined set of capabilities?
Does ChatGPT always give satisfactory results?
How will Gen AI help the advertising industry to evolve with time?
Most asked queries
ChatGPT
Canva
Adobe Photoshop
Copyright infringement
Generative AI
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