Headlines You Should Know
From Mad Men to Machines? Big Advertisers Shift to AI
Like communication professionals, advertising giants are diving into AI. Unilever uses its own generative AI technology to generate product descriptions, and advertising agency WPP has used AI to produce commercials where “the savings can be 10 or 20 times” compared to an on-location shoot.
Meta Releases AI Model for Translating Speech Between Dozens of Languages
Much of AI’s promise has been about quick content creation. Facebook’s parent company may have unlocked an ability to exponentially increase an audience. Today, it released a new AI model called SeamlessM4T that supports translations between text and speech in nearly 100 languages and full speech-to-speech translation for 35 languages.
Elsewhere …
- AI Can’t Build a High-Rise, but It Can Speed Up the Job
- A Pink Floyd Song Made With AI and Brain Scans Sounds a Lot Like the Band
- Google DeepMind Testing ‘Personal Life Coach’ AI Tool
- AI-Generated Art Cannot Be Copyrighted, Rules a U.S. Federal Judge
- ‘They’re Really, Really Focused on This’: SEC Scrutinizes AI
Tips and Tricks
Writing Your Own AI Manual
What’s happening: The race to implement and advance AI tools often involves bottomless troves of data and fine-tuning, where the conversation gets technical so fast it turns people away. One of the leading AI advocates, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, wrote a blog post that makes working with AI more digestible. He advocates that human expertise, not data, makes AI more useful and that individual “spellbooks,” essentially personalized manuals, are the true key. Here are a couple notes that might be useful to build yours.
Start here: Reflect on your own expertise and how you approach the tasks you’re asking AI to help with. As intimidating as AI can be, it isn’t an expert in everything (yet). You have your own proficiency in a specific domain, and if that knowledge can be absorbed by AI, it will make the model more useful to you. Start putting those thoughts into a document and form your own manual.
Highlight red flags: While AI can make writing more efficient, you want it to sound human. As we covered last week, ChatGPT has some tells, like writing lists using the power of three and explaining what readers are about to learn instead of simply showing them. One reader pointed out that “pioneering” is another favorite word of ChatGPT, and there are other phrases that round out that list, like “In today’s digital landscape…” and some odd analogies like symphonies, labyrinths, beacons, and orchestras. Including a section in your manual about language not to use can be helpful.
Put it to work: Once you’ve distilled your expertise in one place, try uploading it in ChatGPT as custom instructions (which were recently rolled out to free users). This ensures the model can keep all your preferences in mind for every request and actually follow your manual.