Three Reasons Creatives Should Embrace, Not Fear, The Role of AI

Photo by Manuel on Unsplash

Recently, I wrote about brand safety and brand suitability in podcasting, the topics of our latest research project, Safe and Sound. I knew that I needed to come up with a solid distinction between the two concepts, because they are managed very differently. I gave it a couple of stabs, but brain-addled by RSV/Anthrax/The Grippe or whatever else is making everyone sick right now, I was struggling for clear writing.

So, I gave ChatGPT a shot. You’ve seen the term thrown around a bit, or even used it. For those who haven’t, ChatGPT is a new kind of chatbot — much more advanced than you have likely ever encountered. This AI-driven dialogue engine is vastly more powerful than “Julie” who takes your Amtrak reservations (sorry, Jules). No, ChatGPT is designed to do something that almost feels like magic, or actual thinking, or magical thinking. You give it a prompt, like “write me a term paper about the importance of public beheadings in England to the works of Lewis Carroll” (a thing I believe I actually wrote in grad school), and you will get something back that is either wondrously or terrifyingly like real, human writing.

I’ve played around with it before, so I was comfortable with using it for this query: “Define and describe the difference between brand safety and brand suitability in advertising.” What I got back was pretty good — four paragraphs, written at at least a high school level, and factually correct, if a little prosaic. I used none of it — the text, while competent, wasn’t quite Webster-level and certainly didn’t reflect my tone or voice. But, as I said, it was competent, and in one of the paragraphs was a turn of phrase that inspired me, which I distilled down to the phrase I actually wrote: “brand safety is about avoiding negative content, and suitability is about seeking relevant content.”

Now, I was pretty happy with that. I probably would have gotten to something like it over time, or over a few drafts, but ChatGPT definitely got me there quicker. I would never let it write my articles — you’d suss it in a heartbeat. But I am not ashamed in the least to say that it was an excellent writer’s aide to help get me where I wanted to go.

In the Sounds Profitable partners’ Slack channel, I also posted another fun ChatGPT result…