Episode 91: AI – threat or promise?

00:02 

Intro: 

Welcome to the CIM Marketing podcast. The contents and views expressed by individuals in the CIM Marketing Podcast are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the companies they work for. We hope you enjoy the episode.  

  

00:16 

Host: 

Hello everybody, and welcome to the CIM marketing podcast! And you know, AI is on everybody's mind. I've got many friends and relations who work in the creative sector, and the key word that seems to be holding sway at the moment is fear. I spoke to a dear friend of mine the other day who works in post-production, and she's fearing for her job and the jobs of all her colleagues. I've got a friend who is very senior, a decorated guy in the world of VFX, and who is considering retraining as a plumber because he thinks that in five years’ time he won't have a career. I don't know if he's right or not. Maybe we'll find a little bit more about whether he's right or not today. Similarly, in the same day that I had the conversation with my friend who works in post-production, I was asked myself to train an LLM, a large language model, the chatGPT’s and the like, which I felt I ought to reject the opportunity because of what my friends have seen saying. So this is a big change. I mean, this sounds like a facile thing to say, that it's a big, swinging change. People don't know whether it is threat or whether it is promise, whether it is an opportunity or whether it's a crisis, and perhaps we can shed some light on those questions today with a very special guest and an absolute expert in the world of AI marketing and ethics around it, which is Mr. Jonathan Gabe. Jonathan started in the world as a journalist, he became a PR. He then went into advertising, worked for three advertising agencies, including Saatchi and Saatchi. He's a fellow of the Chartered Institute of marketing. He has authored 16 books, and his 17th book is coming out very soon, “Digital marketing and AI psychology”. So, he is the man to answer some of these questions. Jonathan, how are you, sir?  

  

02:07 

Jonathan Gabe: 

I'm okay, and listen, I want you to tell your friend, in terms of the plumbing thing, that I’ve got two pieces of advice for him. Number one, a plumber and an electrician would never be out of work. That's good news. But the other piece of advice is, don't panic, because you do not have to retrain as a plumber quite yet. Because, I think somebody famous somewhere said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, and I think that there are ways around this fear issue, and it's all to do with proper training in terms of knowing how to use AI. I teach prompt engineering for CIM and I advise about it around the world to brands, and when I'm talking to people in America, they're telling me that if you are a good copywriter, so you know your stuff as a copywriter, or a graphic designer, but then on top of that, you learn about LLMs and all the rest of it and you become good at that, they're finding that their wages are going up. That's right, up! By a minimum of $10,000 a year. Look, as a fellow journalist, you can't always believe the media, you know, so it's not as bad as people think. I think this is a golden opportunity.  

 

03:50 

Host:  

Golden opportunity? That is a very positive message to start this show with! And I can hear lots of marketers in my ear across the world who listen to this show, thinking, how is it an opportunity? It's going to take our jobs, it's doing things that we do on a day to day basis.  

  

04:07  

Jonathan Gabe: 

It's going to take your current job, but it's going to create a new job. It is a new opportunity. All right, Ben, because it's you and only because it's you, I'm going to put my cards on the table and I'm going to say yes, there are some places that it will take jobs. These are jobs to do with processing numbers, crunching numbers, processing facts. So I think that, and Sir Martin Sowell said this recently, by the way, I think that things like media buying will be affected because you're crunching numbers, what's the best deal, and all that sort of idea. So I think those sorts of things will be affected.  

 

However, I think that it will open up different types of opportunities. But the thing is, Ben, you and I are not King Cnut. So we cannot stop the wave coming in, but what we can learn to do is surf the wave, right? And that's what it's about.  

  

05:15  

Host: 

So how do we do it? How do we surf the wave? We've got, you know, roughly full employment at the moment in this country and marketing is doing okay. It's come out of COVID ok. People are in job, so that it's not that they're currently being rejected from jobs, but they fear that's going to happen unless they get ready for this coming wave. They don't want to be the King Cnut’s. They don't want to try and stop the wave. They want to surf it. How do they learn to surf it? 

  

05:39  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Attend a CIM course! (laughs) We've going to put a plug in haven’t we, for goodness sake, we're marketing! 

 

But no, seriously, get trained. I'm really serious about it, actually. Get trained because as marketers, what we have to do is that we have to demonstrate to the world that we are doing things in the correct way. You were talking about ethics. We're doing it from a point of view of responsibility and integrity. I mean, last night, I'd given a talk in London to the Brand Association, and I put up a slide, and it was of a medicine man from the wild west, and they used to sell all these elixirs – you know, like you drink this and it will cure anything. And I am being inundated, because everyone knows I'm involved with AI, I mean, inundated by these medicine men, who are, you know, got a bottle of this and a bottle of that in the shape of a ChatGPT something or rather, and so this is what I need for copywriting. This is what I need for something else and all the rest of it, and it's the only thing I need. But what we try to do at CIM is show people that you don't actually need all that stuff. There is a way of working with openAI, working with Gemini, working with Claude. Those are the three main models that I look at, and then taking it from there.  

  

06:58  

Host: 

It’s interesting, isn't it? I get the advertising from the medicine men every day. I've adopted zero of them so far. Not sure how they fit into my business. How they would fit into my business. We prefer to use AI’s in the small way we're using them at the moment, as you say, as tools that you need to know how to use them as tools. They do bring, even if you can get those skills, which we will get those skills as marketers if we do the right things, we make the right learnings, we go on the right courses, we listen to what experts like yourself say at CIM. There are ethical risks involved with using this stuff. Broadly, what do you find are the key ethical risks of using this stuff, and how do we as marketers avoid them?  

  

07:39  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Okay, so there's a lot of legislation that's just gone through and it's been finished off in terms of the EU and AI. we're actually talking at a really important time historically, because the EU is looking at this. Now, from the point of view of CIM, even before the UK was even looking at anything or EU, they were talking about the idea of the four pillars, if you wish, which was, act ethically, responsibly and with integrity. Number two, ensure quality. Number three, be transparent. And number four, build AI awareness. Now, if I go through those, so the AI awareness – like you started off by talking about the idea of fear, so, actually showing people what it's what it's really about. And again, that goes through education, being transparent. People ask me on these courses, you know, should I tell people that this was generated by AI, and I think that there's no harm in being transparent at the moment in terms of that. Now, five years down the line, when everybody will be looking at AI, it will be adopted all over the place. Should you still be saying, and part of this was to do with AI? I’m not quite sure at that point.  

  

09:04  

Host: 

Yeah. I mean, by that point, does it become like saying that this article I've just sent you was created on Microsoft Word? 

09:12  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Exactly – you've got it bang on Ben, you'd have to tell them oh, I looked up on a dictionary about something or other. It's ridiculous. But at the moment, I would say, yes, we have to ensure quality, because at the end of the day, what we’re doing is we are trying to show that our brands can be trusted. And we are living during an era where there is zero trust of leadership, of politics, of basically anything. And so we’ve got to show that AI doesn’t equate to fake.  

  

09:52  

Host: 

Well, this is it. I mean, the on the politics point, part of that is presumably because the technology is always one or two or three steps ahead of the politicians and the regulations. It seems to me that the regulations and the framework set by nation states, by companies, are always two or three steps behind. And without sort of a step change, we're not going to get it to where companies are ahead of this, where countries are ahead of this, where governments are ahead of this. 

  

10:20  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Well, this year we've got around the world, 50 elections, that's a lot. Now everyone is saying, oh no, AI is going to get involved with elections, and it's going to be this state or that state that's going to be trying to influence us. Now we know, recently, in the UK, that there has been ongoing cyber-attacks, in terms of finding out details. And then eventually, when it comes to general election, there is a serious concern that there will be this influence. But I remember in the, not the last American general election, but the one before that, actually, when Trump got in the first time, and he was talking about the idea about fake news, and I was talking about, well, what is fake? Now, when I was giving talks about that subject at the time, we didn't have AI, well we didn't have AI as we understand it today. And still, people were worrying about this thing about fake. I think that what AI has done is taking it up to the next level in terms of ‘do I trust?’ I think that a lot of people today, when it comes to communications and marcomms and all that sort of idea, are all rather seeing the world through a window, which is called a screen, so there's this detachment. And what I think we've got to do is use AI to rebuild bridges with people to say, actually, you don't have to feel so detached because there is a detachment. Working from home is a detachment. Zooming is a detachment, and I think that we’ve got to start using AI to actually gain trust with people. I mean, Gen Z, they are all born into the world of all this stuff. So I think that the older people need to start thinking about that and using it in a different way. 

  

12:21  

Host: 

Well, that's a mind-blowing idea that something that, as you say, is connected with the words fear and fake and threat could actually be used to be connected with trust and promise and opportunity. How do we use AI to build trust and to remove some of the detachments we are getting from screen based, living, working from home and doing fewer things in person? 

  

12:46  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Fear and fake and those types of words, that kind of thing has always been part of the human condition. And humans have always looked for meaning, not just meaning of the outer world if you wish but meaning of their own self. And in terms of, am I a fake? Am I up to it? I mean, you'll get with a lot of - and it's not just this generation, I can promise you, every generation - you'll get young people who will look at models, for example, on the catwalk and say, you know, am I? You know, I'm comparing myself to them. And this is the stuff that's been going on for decades. It’s nothing new. When I started off with looking at fashion advertising, which I've also been involved with, you would see the model on the catwalk and there's no AI. You could do a bit of Photoshop and stuff like that, but nothing like this. So people have to, first of all, review themselves through AI. 

 

Let me explain how that's done. We all know, and listeners right now, you're listening to this brilliant podcast from Ben, you're listening to it probably, I'm going to guess, on your phone. Now, a lot of people keep talking about, oh, people keep on doing these selfies, there's a selfie for this, they make selfies nonstop. They go to a restaurant, they make a selfie. They go to the cinema, just before they go in, they make a selfie. In fact, they have a selfie for everything. And I think that what's happening in terms of AI and selfies, what I think people are becoming is I think they're becoming curators of their own life, and so they are using AI and other technology. So when you have a picture that isn't the picture that you want to be remembered by, you can switch it. You can change it, you can manipulate it. So what's happening is that we are becoming, all of us, artificial manipulators of our own lives in terms of recording it. And I think that's interesting. 

 

14:49 

Host: 

Interesting, you sound like it's a positive trend?  

 

14:51 

Jonathan Gabe: 

No, it's not a positive trend at all. But what it is, it's about perception. That's what it's about. You know, Ben that for some weird reason the business that we're in, they've got this strange thing that even Freud wouldn't understand, which is attachment to the letter P. There's a P for this, there's a P for that, the five P's, the seven P's, the 8P’s, well, I'll add another one for because I know that marketers love P's - and I'll say perception. And so a lot of it is to do with perception. How people perceive themselves, and then through that, how they act beyond themselves, as I say, to the outer self.  

  

15:32  

Host: 

So do you think because people are to some degree shaping or curating their own lives through digital means, through AI means, or quasi AI means, and they know that they're doing it subconsciously to themselves, they are starting to fear what the outside world is doing to them, and everything seems manipulated, everything seems fake, and that's what's leading to what you imply is an irrational fear of the march of technology?  

  

16:00 

Jonathan Gabe: 

Well, if I'm doing it to myself, as you quite rightly said, then I will expect that you're doing it as well. But somewhere what we need is a halfway point, which is called authenticity, where we will say that we are living in a world of AI, where the potential to manipulate is out there, but don't start throwing stones, mate, because you're doing it to yourself. So that doesn't make it right. But what we've got to do is find some kind of ground level where we can say, actually, this is the truth. Here's another thing in terms of truth. One of the things that you will increasingly be able to do with AI is, funnily enough, check truth. So I think that that's also going to be used, and the shrewd ones will be looking at that and how to use AI for that. But there are a lot of opportunities.  

  

17:02  

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17:13  

Host: 

It's about messaging, is it? We've used stock photography in our business as journalists for you know, since the year dot. You could argue that's fake. You know, beautiful people sort of sitting in an office. No office ever looks that clean and tidy, and the people in it never look as gorgeous. But we use those stock photography because it’s available to us through stock libraries and so on and so forth. They're there to represent a story. They're there to represent an idea. So AI is no different in that regard. But what's key as marketers is that the message that we're using it for has to be authentic. What we're using this artwork for, what we're using these technologies for, has to be an authentic message as marketers. If that message is authentic, it's no different to using a stock photography library to illustrate a true story about recruitment trends or something.  

  

18:02  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Ben, you talk about the idea of fake - let's change that word to insincerity. And the problem that you have with stock photography is that you have these pictures of happy, smiling, beaming people in offices. I mean, they must be on something, because they're so happy with their life. It's not sincere.  

 

Now, what we are looking for is not about fake. We're looking for sincerity. Last night, as I mentioned before, I was giving this talk. Now I created using generative AI, some slick pictures. Those pictures were fake because I generated them. They look pretty convincing, but it's not about the fakeness of the picture. It's about the sincerity of the message. And that's what I think is where we're going to, because I think people will accept that it's technically fake, but what they're more interested in is, is the sincerity of the message. Do you see what I mean? 

  

19:12  

Host: 

I do see what you mean and I think that's a really important point, is that you were using AI generated graphics and so forth to demonstrate a truth. You were using artificial intelligence to illustrate a reality. 

  

19:25  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Exactly. And so it's not about getting hung up about, oh my god, he used AI to generate it. It's not about the medium. It's about the message. And it's always been that.  

  

19:36  

Host: 

So, it's important that marketers understand that the authenticity of the message is key, and the medium that they use is neutral, and that hasn't changed. That's always been the case with any kind of media that we've used since the year dot, since you and I started out in our careers. But nevertheless, their roles are going to change. At the top of the show you said that their current roles will be eclipsed by these technologies. 

 

20:05 

Jonathan Gabe: 

100%. 

 

20:06 

Host: 

So in order to for them to have a new role that pays the extra $10,000 as you were saying, what do they need to do in terms of, yes, go on a course and so on and so forth, but what are their new roles going to look like in the future? So they are living happy careers and happy lives using these tools, being paid $10,000 a year more? 

  

20:25  

Jonathan Gabe: 

So the first thing is, and this is the biggest mistake that people make, right? It's not about attending a course and saying, I know what buttons to press. It's not about the blasted buttons to press. What it's about is going back to basics, and that is understanding syntax, understanding semantics. So it's all about order, meaning, it's more than that. It's about critical thinking. You see AI, let me tell you, don't tell Mr. AI, because he he'll kill me, but between you and me, he's ingeniously stupid, really, absolutely ingeniously stupid. Because AI will only give you an answer based on what your prompt is, and your prompt has got to be the key to all of it. What we teach, and what I try to show people when I go to their organisations is it's all about critical thinking. It's all about not just saying, write me a headline about blah, blah, blah. The LLMs are trained on millions, billions of pieces of information. And all they do, by the way, is they give you the average answer to something. And this is where I do get worried about AI. Without the correct training, what AI will produce is more gunk. It will produce brands that are bland. So you will have answers, as I said, based on the most common issue, it will give you an answer for that. For example, many decades ago, I used to write for Readers Digest, and I used to write adverts for people like great universal stores, in other words, catalog stuff. This was the days of catalog stuff when I started. And my boss used to say to me, Jonathan, don't forget every headline, yours free. It's got to be yours free. It's got to be somewhere there. So send off today, or call today, or that kind of stuff. Now, what there's a danger of is that if AI knows that yours free is the most popular thing in terms of what to write in a piece of copy, then all the copy is going to start looking and sounding the same. And the moment, going back to trust, people don't trust brands as they used to trust brands. And so when they start seeing that everyone is sounding the same and saying the same stuff, brand blandness, as I call it, then what they would do is switch off. So therefore, it makes sense to get properly trained on how to use this thing.  

  

23:21  

Host: 

And that is the human advantage, isn't it? Brands are going to want to avoid this modernisation. They're going to want to avoid this blandness. And good marketers know the prompts, know the instructions to give these things so they avoid any blandness, they avoid simulation, they avoid being derivative, and actually can create, using these tools, something original. There's the opportunity for marketers. 

  

23:44  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Exactly. And on top of that, there's also what I call the brand version of BBC verified. So every time I'm looking on the news, I see this little logo, all of a sudden, BBC verified. And I'm thinking to myself, actually, one of the other new roles that we have to have as marketers is to be brand verifiers. So people would trust us, if we do it right that is, to verify what AI has finally produced.  

 

So the first stage is getting the prompt right, and that is what we used to call in the old days, going back to a great creative brief,  but this is now not answering the question. This is like delivering the questions. So we've got to really start thinking in that kind of more in-depth way.  

 

The next thing is about iterating the answers so you get back answer number one, which is pretty cool. But then you think, well, I think we need to do X, Y, Z to it, right? So it's about understanding how to iterate, and also understanding when to stop iterating. Then the next, final part of the whole thing is to verify, verify and verify and verify. Because what we are as marketers, is we are actually not just spokespeople for a product or service, but we are also advocates for our consumers. We must hold a mirror to those consumers. We must reflect what they want and what they need. There's a bigger question about what is it they want and what they need, but that's a more philosophical thing - I won't talk about that one today. But I would say that they are trusting us, that what we're putting out there, it is authentic. It is sincere, it is transparent. It has integrity. All the things that people would want for themselves, that they buy through a brand.  

  

25:59  

Host: 

It’s interesting, isn't it? Because we talked earlier about stock photography as an analog, and if you don't get the prompts right, if you're not original in your iterations, you are just going to create a whole new breed, a new generation, of AI stock photography. All of the things about offices, if you try to create an AI for offices, using pretty simple prompts, will look very similar. You will get things that aren't authentic, that aren't real, that look exactly like, as I say, the new breed, the new generation of stock. So marketers have a real role as prompt engineers in bringing that originality in so they can create new, interesting, original on-brand work for their clients. 

  

26:43  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Correct. Now, you also mentioned that, going back to the beginning, the idea of film, and there are some pieces of AI which are still, well, they're actually in their final bit of testing at the moment. I'm talking about things like Sora. Now, Sora is quite incredible, because what you can do with it is that you can type a description of whatever it is that you want the film to be, in whatever style you want it to be, including the style, I believe, of the film director. That's crazy. And then it will produce a perfect piece of footage.  

 

However, what people don't understand is that, A, the footage is very short. B, actually stop running to the hills and pulling your hair out and screaming at everyone because we've had this stuff for years. Now look, I am probably one of the biggest Batman fans in the world.  

 

27:48 

Host: 

That's quite a claim, Jonathan! 

 

27:49 

Jonathan Gabe: 

Isn't it? You see, who cares about this marketing and psychology stuff? Let's talk about the Dark Knight! The idea of using AI, they wouldn't have called it that back then. They would have called it green screen and bits and bobs. It's not new. So, you know, this is just another iteration of it. It's the next stage of it. So, I mean, you know, we're all saying, oh my god, it's gonna… well, we've been using it for years! 

  

28:14  

Host: 

We’ve been using something that's analogous to it, but not Sora itself.  

  

28:18  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Yeah, but it's a much more sophisticated version of the same thing. It's just much more sophisticated. And whichever Batman you want to go back to, and I don't go back to TV series, that's just like, not allowed to go back there, it's too wham and pow for me. But back to the movie versions of Batman, I'm afraid, green screen and whatever they would have called it, I'm not a filmmaker, would have been around then. Nothing new.  

  

28:46  

Host: 

So nothing new under the sun. But we need to understand, as marketers, how the technologies work. So we could talk for hours more, and I hope you'll come back on, Jonathan, I particularly want to talk to you in another future episode about rights and image rights and how marketers handle those, but we've run out of time today in a fascinating conversation, which is, I think, gone from industry analysis through to psychology and even philosophy at times.  

 

But the key message from you is a positive one, isn't it? That marketers should be positive about this. Get to understand the technology, understand that you can offer originality as human beings, and if you don't offer that originality as marketers, then we're going to end up with a whole new world of bland. 

  

29:32  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Absolutely. And I’ll just do one, one final caveat - absolutely agree with you 125,000 million percent, but I just had one caveat, and that is, if you don't offer it, your competitors will. 

  

29:48  

Host: 

A good call to action. Jonathan Gabe, it's been great to have you on the show. Thank you very much for very enlightening discussion and for your time and insights. Jonathan Gabe, thank you very much indeed.  

  

30:00  

Jonathan Gabe: 

Thank you. 

 

30:01 

Outro: 

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