There is no denying the need for AI technology, it is being used to detect early signs of cancer, map sand dredging and chart methane emissions. However, when we talk about this form of technology in a marketing capacity, its output is slightly less impressive, but still a disruptive factor in the industry..
Although the need for AI is clear, it remains important that this technology and associated applications are used sensibly to ensure they are having a positive impact and never a detrimental one to your business or its customers. What ways can AI have an impact on your marketing?
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The Environmental Impact of AI
Consumers are getting increasingly mindful about where they are spending their money, wanting to ensure they are contributing to a business that aligns with their values, including eco-conscious values. This shift is putting more and more pressure on companies to invest in technology that does less damage to the environment.
Comparing AI generative tools, like ChatGPT and Gemini, to traditional search engines, the AI tools come up much worse. They use more energy and water, they produce more waste and the impact isn’t set to improve any time soon.
- Thousands of megawatt hours of energy are needed for the training for a single AI model.
- Every 10 to 50 responses from ChatGPT running GPT-3 can evaporate the equivalent of a bottle of water to cool the AI’s servers.
- Tasks involving images emit more carbon than those involving text alone.
- The energy used to train the average AI model is expected to increase 10 fold each year.
AI can damage your credibility and reputation
There have been endless examples of AI created content that have completely missed the mark. Blogs have been written and published with misinformation, social posts have gone live tagging the wrong accounts and ChatGPT is still known for lying if it doesn’t know the answer, so this issue hasn’t gone away.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t use AI in marketing. There are many ways to use AI in marketing, which are easy and help speed up standard processes. The general rule of thumb is to use AI generative tools like an intern, it can do some wonderful things, approach tasks from a fresh perspective, and overall really speed up tasks – however you need to check everything it produces because it’s still learning and it may get things wrong.
If you do choose to use AI in your marketing processes, it’s important that you use it correctly.
AI can make your marketing boring
Relying on AI to create your marketing content can do something worse than damaging your reputation, it can make your marketing boring.
When masses of content are created using the same tools, it can all start to look the same. The way that AI large language models are built, is that they are pre-fed data and then answer questions based on prompts. When every marketer around the country is asking ChatGPT to “write a social caption about valentines day for a company that is focused on [insert industry here].”, all the responses begin to look the same and you’ve lost your brand’s unique tone of voice and values.
You can still make marketing content that stands out with AI, but it takes slightly longer prompts and means you aren’t solely relying on AI to do the whole job for you.
AI can impact your team’s development
Relying on AI tools to create content can mean that your teams aren’t getting the chances you may have had to try and fail at making content. The best way to understand an audience is to test what engages them most.
Beyond content creation, if someone is always relying on an AI bot to give them the answer, they don’t develop the creative thinking needed to solve the answer.
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