Innovation Over Ice: Taste is Fundamentally Human
The potential of AI to change the marketing game had been slowly taking shape over the past several years, then OpenAI’s ChatGPT blew the door wide open. Ultimately what does this really mean for marketers? Some view it as a threat and some view it as an incredible opportunity. But one thing is clear, it’s never been more important to fully understand how companies are already using AI and where they see it going in the future.
To dig into the potential - and potential concerns - around the rise of generative AI in marketing, Winter Sun hosted a happy hour roundtable discussion (we’re calling it ‘Innovation Over Ice’) with some of our partners who are on the forefront of marketing and technology.
In this series of posts, we will be pulling out our key takeaways from the conversation between our Managing Partner, Owen Frivold, and Mark McKenna (CEO at Instapage), Steven Wong (Cofounder and Co-CEO at Ready State), and Mark Wenneker (Founder of Sheet Metal Arts, CCO in Residence at Winter Sun).
Key Theme #1: Taste is fundamentally human
There will always be a need for creative talent because mass produced content just isn’t interesting. While AI has created a way to personalize, standardize, and scale in terms of language or organized facts, it can’t yet elicit real emotion. And even if it gets to the point where it can, the role of a human creative will evolve to be something even more unique and inspiring - we just don’t know what that looks like yet.
Excerpt from our conversation on February 10:
Owen
What are some of the biggest challenges from a creative standpoint that you see these [Generative AI] solutions addressing?
Mark W
I don't think for me, it's not a challenge. Your mind is open, like you just said, you give a few prompts on something, you're thinking in your head, and then you have this partner, this robot that's your partner spitting out something and thinking ahead of you or researching or something like that. For me, it just blows my mind. I think we're still going through, creatively our minds are just still in slow motion blown phase.
Owen
Yeah, trying to figure out what use cases to even deploy it against.
Mark W
It went from three years ago: a joke. People were making jokes about it. To now it's conversation at every table, and it's affecting and it's scaring the hell out of a lot of people, but also affecting. What am I going to go into? What should our kids go into now? What should we not waste our time with? I have three daughters, so it makes me wonder that more than ever. A real skill is important. Something that can't be duplicated or can't be spit out from a computer. An actual skill and trade. And that's where I think creativity is. It's going to be a while before these guys can sit down and concept iterations of something that will make people laugh or cry? Probably.
Steven
Well, if it can, then we'll stop valuing that, right.
Mark W
Yeah. A friend of mine just started a company called The Quills. It takes all the writers out there and it helps them find the jobs that are out there. And I saw it and I was like, there is so much talent out there. That writing talent, that is amazing. But my head basically went with, I think editors are going to be the thing, not writers. There's lots of different kinds of writing, but the writing that can be spit out on an email or iterated or factual, AI can go ahead and do that. But the real columns, smart columns, or stories… you have to go through this phase where you need skill to edit it. You need skill to make sure it's great. I think we're basically saying this is not the death of writing, this is birth of editing.
Owen
Yeah, it's interesting you bring that up. I think a couple of themes have come about. The barrier to creation is so low with this tech that it's sort of creation through curation. It's like curation, whether it's editorial or Steven, you have some thoughts on the taste-making nature of “you generated, but that doesn't make it good, right?" That doesn't necessarily make it appealing”.
Steven
I'm glad you brought that up. I want to press a little deeper with Mark. I think taste is fundamentally human, right? So I'm not so worried that if they're in the creative space, I got a kid as well, and I'm thinking, well, what's he going to do if they're in the creative space or the creation space? There's always going to be room for us to create something that is tasteful to other human beings. It can be replicated by a machine, but as soon as it's mass replicated, it's not that interesting anymore. It's not that exciting. There's no connection. It feels cheap, commodified.
That's where I'm coming from. I think it's true, but we'll see. But if all this content on the web - written long form, visual - is being produced by machines and then consumed by other machines to produce new stuff, doesn't it take us back to a place where we start valuing real people output again? So we want articles that were not on Facebook or Reddit or wherever, but it actually came from a pub, from a news source.
Mark M
My read into this... there's this concept that the web is becoming standardized. Standardized from a content point of view, from a layout point of view. For us, there's only so many variations of a landing page where you sign up for a course. We know the magic sauce, right? We already have the magic sauce. So I think we're going to go through a phase where you do have standardization, and I think that's probably four to six years of that happening. But then I agree with you. Then it's going to be like, okay, everyone's kind of the same. All right, let's have some new tricks that are out there. So I'm 100% in alignment with you. I just think it's going to take some time for us to get to the point where you're kind of seeing the same things in a lot of ways out there. So I definitely agree. I just think it's going to take some time.
Owen
But I think to your point, Mark McKenna, in the nature of what you do, because the barrier to entry to creating is lower, the ability to use that technology. You can mass produce, but now you can also mass personalize. So I think what you also see is at first there's a structure to it all, but then there's also an element of everyone now gets a different view on things personalized to them because what used to be a high barrier for production - or data or any other tool to be able to personalize on a one to one basis - it just feels like it lowered the access point for one to one personalization. So then you still have to put the right guardrails. But all of a sudden you have at least the potential for that usage. It used to be like: "we can't produce 3000 different versions of the same thing". Well, now you can with a click of a button. You don't necessarily know for sure that it's good yet. You still need to find the right checks and balances for that.
