The 4 types of AI

Quickly.

I took a DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance) personality test and learned that I’m an extreme D and rank low in the S and C traits. The low Steadiness explains why I can’t seem to write each week.

I’ve been busy!

I was on a podcast with fellow marketer Chase Mohseni discussing experimentation and how marketing orgs are set up to execute them. We chatted Vision Pro and the current IPO environment. Chase does this thing where he acts truly blown away by whatever someone says - this is the secret to creating an engaging pod btw.

Ok. Let’s talk AI.

We’re halfway into 2023 but we are undeniably in the year of AI. Artificial intelligence has been around for years but the past few months have seen it skyrocket. But why now and do we really understand the fundamentals of AI amid this current hype?

This episode of Startups For The Rest of Us with Rob Walling and Einar Vollset gave a great way to think about AI in a fundamental way. The whole episode is an engaging listen but here’s the topline and of course a few of my own thoughts.

The 4 types of AI

1. Generative - creation

2. Group - categorize & classify

3. Gist - summarize & simplify > clean up

4. Guess - predictive

Grouping & Gist: The best for productivity

The Gist and Grouping of things are actually the most productive application of AI in real world marketing use cases.

One example I stumbled upon is giving Google Bard a competitor’s sitemap so that it can give me insight into how many pages it has, what its folder structure is, and what the word count is on each individual page. Super useful info to impact your SEO strategy by asking AI to Group and to give you the Gist of a data set. Take a look.

Marketers aren’t particularly great with advanced excel but Chat GPT changes that very quickly and with Google implementing AI directly into their office suite things will get really interesting.

Generative AI: The most misunderstood

Generative AI is the current application of AI with the likelihood to immediately excite and wow people. Obviously it’s things like artwork created from Midjourney but it’s also where coding or just document/article creation from a simple prompt lives.

Generative AI’s current state is impressive but somewhat overrated.

After you create a few images in Midjourney you’re over it. After asking Chat GPT to write a few business plans or SEO articles for you the appeal starts to wear off.

Why? Well because generative AI is essentially autocomplete.

You know when you start typing a search query into Google and it adds things like “near me” to it? Well, that’s essentially how generative AI works today. When you ask Chat GPT to write a business plan for you it’s essentially using a predictive form of autocomplete but instead of just 2-3 words it’s doing it over and over again.

But when you see this in action enough times you understand that the most likely thing to come next is also the most boring.

And for something like a basic job description blah is fine but AI will never give you a recipe with that one unexpected ingredient that just blows your mind.

Generative art also has the effect of immediate excitement but the wow wears off quickly. It’s autocomplete art. For art to be great it needs the unexpected either in the work itself or even in the story of the artist - like the artist whose work is truly average but becomes popular after a tragic death. AI can’t do that.

I’m not bashing on generative AI, I think it’s a great tool for brainstorming and concepting, and I think there’s so much more to come but I still think it will take a human to connect a dot that was never connected before in order to produce something truly awesome.

The best generative AI tools will allow us to blend the boring bits with the human centered creative parts.

Guessing: The most untapped

Predictive AI seems to be fairly quiet today. Generative AI often feels predictive but really it’s summarization and autocomplete. Predictive is the idea that AI could come up with something that we aren’t even able to think of today. A new technology or a new style devoid of a human prompt asking for it. It’s exciting and scary but we’re not there yet with the state of AI available today.

I’m keeping an eye out though and If you know of any examples of it send me them on Twitter.

Humans and AI

My grandfather was a calm and curious man. I only share his curiosity.

He was in his 80s when he got a Mac Mini which he would email me from and then went on to create his own blog with. I admire him in many ways but truly appreciate that he saw the world as something that he was experiencing without opinion or belief in what it should or should not be.

We’re often so precious with our nostalgia and beliefs that we let them shape our views of how things should be. Who are we and what is the point of opinions formed over the 80 or so years we are given in a billion year old universe?

Every generation thinks the next one will be worse off but very rarely in our history is it ever the case. AI feels like something that will wash over us the way the internet did 30 years ago and I’m definitely uncomfortable with it but my curiosity is so high that I don’t dare to have an opinion of what it’s impact should or should not be.

Thanks for reading - have a happy 4th!