Last month we posted the first blog post in our series about the impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on business, both good and bad. We focused on summative AI last time; this month we’re going to look at Generative AI.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content like text, images or music by learning patterns from existing data. It can be used in many ways, such as to create posters, produce art or write up blog posts like this one.
Things to consider
Whilst the advantages of this are obvious (for example, being able to whip up a social media post or promotional art in seconds yourself instead of having to learn how to make these from scratch or hiring someone) there are some potential downsides to consider:
- Perceived laziness: if your customers can tell content was made using generative AI, this can be viewed negatively as uncreative or low effort. It’s important to ensure work is high quality and to keep your customer base in mind when producing content, even with the help of AI.
- Uncanny valley: AI created content can have ‘tells’ such as certain punctuation being overused like em dashes (—) or particularly with AI created art poor anatomy can give it away as being generated rather than designed by a human.
- Hallucinating sources: there have been numerous high-profile examples of AI making up sources when producing ‘evidence based’ written content, so it’s important to fact check any sources used to avoid embarrassment.
- Implicit bias: as generative AI learns from existing data, this can produce skewed results due to implicit bias in the original data. This in turn can create more content filled with bias or stereotypes which will then worsen over time as the bias gets stronger.
- Creative decline: if you work in an industry that produces work that can now be generated by AI, this can result in less work to yourself as people move towards using AI tools rather than hiring creatives.
What do you think?
Do you use generative AI in your business? What do you think when you can tell a business has used generative AI? Please join in the conversation below.
