DUBAI: In an almost ominous prediction of what the future could look like for the creative industries, ChatGPT, the controversial OpenAI tool, has become the brains behind the latest outdoor ads at the STEP Conference tech festival.
The ads feature taglines like “Your money needs a side hustle,” “Save the planet, it’s the only one with good coffee,” “The art on the wall is so last century,” and “Who needs football stickers when do you have digital cats?” among others.
Initially, STEP planned to use its agency Mink to create the ads, but “we weren’t happy” with the slogans created by the agency and STEP’s internal team, Ray Dargham, founder of STEP Conference, told Arab News. “Then, we tried ChatGPT and they came out much better, so we went with that.”
In addition to external campaigning, the firm has also used the chatbot to “write session briefs, create social posts, and write copy and general content,” he said.
For the STEP team, the chatbot is “almost like an artificial intelligence assistant that makes them faster and more efficient in their work”.
That’s why the company plans to continue using the AI tool and get at least one paid account that would be used by the entire team to “create, summarize and explain content whenever it’s needed,” Dargham explained.
You only need to watch movies like “Her” or “Ex Machina” to realize that neither the concept of AI and AI-based chatbots nor the existential threat they pose are new. Furthermore, experts have argued that AI has created more jobs than it has erased, with one report stating that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 have not yet been invented.
When copywriters are replaced by chatbots, however, it’s hard to recognize the job-creating ability of AI. And with other AI tools like Meta’s Open Pretrained Transformer, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard, chatbot use and the threat to jobs are likely to increase.
Dargham clarified that he has no plans to mandate the use of ChatGPT within the company, “but I think our team will naturally want to use it if they think it will make their lives easier.
“If you’re a copywriter, you have to constantly churn out copy, and it’s not always easy to be creative,” she added.
For Dargham, ChatGPT and other AI tools are more complementary than competitive. But do you expect such AI tools to replace human talent?
“I think AI tools will complement and replace human talent. However, I also think human talent will find more useful things to do,” she said.
He added: “Human creativity will always be extremely valuable.”
