Bart Caylor, President and Founder, Caylor Solutions. We’re a marketing agency committed to advancing brands that advance education.
These days, everyone’s talking about the looming chaos of the AI revolution. But should marketing professionals really be concerned about losing their jobs to robots?
As AI technology becomes increasingly sophisticated, it’s capable of mimicking and even surpassing human abilities in certain tasks. This includes data analysis and pattern recognition, areas where AI can outperform humans significantly. But once you’ve spent a good amount of time with AI technologies like ChatGPT, you quickly realize that humans have one major advantage over artificial intelligence: being human.
I’m convinced that instead of replacing humans, artificial intelligence has the potential to make us even more human than we’ve ever been. To support my theory, here are five ways in which AI cannot compete with a human marketer:
1. Human Opinions And Decision Making
One thing humans are incredibly adept at is having multiple opinions, sometimes even when they lack any substantial experience or knowledge of a particular subject. The capacity to embrace diverse perspectives highlights the intricacies of human thinking and the dynamics of our social interactions.
While AI can detect patterns and make predictions, AI cannot replicate this “gut feeling” or intuition we have as human beings. As a human marketer, if you can express well-formed opinions in your content, you can stand out among AI-generated content.
A natural outgrowth of our human intuition is the ability to make decisions about campaigns, missional imperatives and strategies. The distinctly human ability to initiate creative projects or plans requires creativity to generate innovative solutions for intricate and ever-evolving problems. This kind of conviction that your idea will succeed in order to propel the launch of a new product, project or initiative remains exclusively human.
2. Emotion
Along with opinions, humans are also capable of holding multiple emotions all at the same time. This is in stark contrast to the relative coldness, or detachment, you feel with AI-generated content. Machines simply lack the lived experience and the intrinsic human touch to have genuine emotions.
In spite of AI’s growing capabilities to mimic human emotions, marketers can exploit their advantage by crafting emotive content, especially in video marketing and video-heavy social media channels, areas in which AI is far from being able to produce at any comparable level.
3. Humor
Marketing professionals have the unique advantage of understanding and leveraging original humor, a distinctly human trait that AI technology struggles to replicate. Injecting humor into content can make it more engaging, relatable and memorable for the audience. The nuances of humor—such as timing, context and cultural references—are challenging for AI to grasp and execute effectively.
Note that the operative word here is “original.” AI can imitate the human phenomenon of comedy and humor, as creativity writing expert Ann Handley points out in her article on AI’s use of humor. However, as she demonstrates, AI humor at this point is predictable and patently derivative. That means that original humor gives an edge to human marketers over AI. It’s an effective way to stand out in a sea of AI-generated content that might be technically perfect but lacks the human touch.
4. Rhetorical Devices
Another area in which marketing professionals can outshine AI is the utilization of rhetorical devices such as irony, satire, rhetorical questions, similes and metaphors. These kinds of communication tools work on multiple levels of understanding and interpretation, offering a depth and complexity to communication that goes beyond the literal. This level of semantic complexity is hard to achieve for AI, as it requires a nuanced understanding of language and context that goes beyond pattern recognition and data processing.
Rhetorical devices are powerful tools for brand differentiation, enabling marketers to create memorable content that stands out. From a satirical take on a popular trend to a self-deprecating joke about the brand, rhetoric can add an element of surprise and amusement to the content, making the brand appear more human, relatable and authentic.
5. Real-Life Experiences
Of all the ways humans surpass AI’s capabilities, there is no place in which we outshine the robots more than in the area of lived experience. Machines do not live in the real world, and therefore, they cannot experience those uniquely human moments of epiphany, resolve, sublimity, regret, elation, shame, etc. By featuring these kinds of life-altering experiences in content, marketers can immediately distinguish their messaging from AI-generated content.
Furthermore, AI, no matter how advanced, cannot replace the experiences and emotions that make up your life or the lives of others. As a result, testimonials are poised to become an increasingly valuable source of content for consumers, providing genuine insights and relatable perspectives.
In conclusion, like the introduction of personal computers, and later the Internet, marketing professionals can and will find ways to adapt to the new rules of this evolving marketplace. I’d encourage you to think of AI more as “cobots” (short form for “collaborative robots,” coined at the turn of the century by professors at Northwestern University) rather than job-stealing machines. While every marketer should stay on top of the advancements of the AI revolution, if we can get better at being what we already are—human beings—we have nothing to fear.
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