My team and I have been testing out several Generative AI tools to help us be more efficient with our work. I know, I know the sound of another person talking about Generative AI is probably not what you think you need, but in this post, I wanted to share a few ways that you can use AI to be the mod (if you know you know. If you don’t, stop what you’re doing and go watch The Book of Boba Fett series on Disney+).

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI or Generative Artificial Intelligence is the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to create new content. You’ve probably experienced this through Chatbots or through an article that you read on Apple News or on some major news outlets.

There are a lot of tools that are out there that make Generative AI a valuable tool to help you do more, do better, and do it faster. Dall-E-2 is one of the more well-known frameworks to generate images (my team and I are still waiting for my invite to use the Dall-E-2 platform). OpenAI Codex and Polycoder are two tools to help development teams be more effective and efficient when it comes to building websites. Copy.ai and Jasper.ai are two tools to help write copy from headlines to meta descriptions to whole ebooks and blog posts. And tools like Pixelhunter and Creatopy allow marketing and creative teams to easily generate the images they need across platforms.

Some of the platforms I mention above push the bounds of the definition of Generative AI, but I lump them together because conceptually they are all the same. They provide ways to remove human hands when creating the content needed to amplify your brand’s story.

I’m not sure I’m comfortable giving up control.

One of the things I hear from a lot of people when we talk about Generative AI is that they’re not ready to give up control. Or that they fear the ai will replace them and make their job obsolete. I understand this is scary. I also understand that to grow you need to create or generate a lot of content and let’s face it, budgets are not growing as fast as salaries are, so the answer to “why are you not growing more” is often — “I don’t have time to be everywhere and do everything.” Or “I don’t have all the skills I need to do everything I should and I don’t have the budget to hire someone who does.”

It’s for these reasons that I encourage everyone to think of Generative AI tools as mods to themselves. Jasper can help get you unstuck and ensures what you produce is SEO friendly. Creatopy takes your designs and easily ports them to all the ad sizes needed. OpenAI Codex reduces the mistakes when you’re pushing thousands of lines of code for a new website.

Think about we all talk about marketing automation, so scheduling emails or texts to go out on a schedule or after an action. We use content management systems (CMS) to make publishing easy and include workflows to make sure that the content is perfect before we publish it. Generative AI tools should be looked at like this. They allow us to sharpen our skills. To do more with our time. And to amplify our brand stories louder.

Does Generative AI actually work?

When my team started using AI to be more efficient we empowered our teams to implement the AI systems that would help them. Our copywriting team implemented our text-based AI. Our Creative Director found and implemented Creatopy to help with routine tasks. And our SA (Solutions Architects) tested out and approved the use of our automated code checkers. Not generative AI, but our testing team oversees our automated testing to ensure that when things are not right we know as quickly as possible. All of these teams approached AI as a way to make them better and more effencient. They all understood we’re not replacing their jobs, but by automating some things, we can do more creative and fun projects.

A few months ago there was an article that came out that said content generated by AI alone does to a Google SEO policy. The interview went on to say that Google’s algorithm can not often tell if a piece of content is generated by AI. The tools are good and adding a human layer on top of AI tools makes them even better. It provides a level of context that can be missing and allows cultural references to be added that connect with your target audience.

I encourage everyone to examine their systems and process and see if AI can help. Systems are only as good as the people who use them, so it may not be a light switch, but after you train the AI and the team understands its capacity it will reduce the amount of time many tasks take. Check out my TikTok this week to see some examples from when we tried an image AI tool (we did this to help us understand the abilities and prepare best for how we’ll use Dall-E-2).

I’d love to chat with anyone who has questions. My team and I often do a few demos or tests (taking your content and having our AI create something different and seeing if you can spot the generated on).