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Marketing in the era of GPT-4 is a doomed profession

I've set this video from Microsoft to start at 7:54. Go ahead and watch about 30 seconds of it.

As a former high-tech marketing VP, I can confirm that marketing writing is generally pretty undistinguished. You don't have to be Shakespeare to put together a brochure or a PowerPoint presentation about a new product.

In other words, marketing is ideal for the kind of things GPT-4 is capable of. All that's necessary is that it somehow gets trained on facts and features about the new gizmo. And since this is marketing, even GPT-4's propensity for exaggeration is a feature, not a bug.

So what's the future of marketing communications when Microsoft Office can create data sheets, press releases, product slicks, websites, and so forth in about two minutes?

That's a very good question.

8 thoughts on “Marketing in the era of GPT-4 is a doomed profession

  1. D_Ohrk_E1

    ...or perhaps what you're really saying is, much of marketing is built on bullshit that an AI can currently do(?)

  2. aldoushickman

    What I find depressing about all of this is the increase in volume of material being shunted to us to look at. In the days when it took a flesh-and-blood person to draft emails and write reports, I could trust that a choke point on how many emails and reports I'm expected to read was the time it took people to actually make them.

    But the idea of an army of helpful Microsoft robots churning out slide decks and memos in seconds--particularly ones I have to pay *more* attention to because the robot is going to make bizarre and hard-to-detect mistakes--just makes me feel tired.

    I guess the solution is another layer of AI that will filter things based on what some predictive algorithm thinks needs to be elevated to to actual humans to review, and then an ensuing arms war as different layers and levels of bots race to trick each other into getting human attention . . .

  3. clawback

    "But but the AI just spits out bullshit puffery" as if that world is going to be any different from our current one.

  4. Brett

    Assuming they can get rid of the unreliability/"hallucination" issue?

    Prompt writing! It's the Revenge of the Text. Figure out how to creatively generate prompts and add enough human involvement to copyright it, and you're golden.

  5. Citizen Lehew

    Software developers aren't far behind. They demo'd taking a pic of an idea scribbled on a napkin that it quickly deciphered and turned into a functioning website.

    1. dausuul

      Software developers are in no danger from LLMs as they stand, except maybe "devs" whose only experience is from a mediocre boot camp, who just plug stuff into frameworks.

      And yes, I've worked with GPT-3 and I've seen what GPT-4 did. It's impressive for a computer, but it isn't anywhere near doing what a skilled dev does. Cranking out boilerplate code is the smallest part of the job.

      Check back in ten years.

  6. kaleberg

    Chat-GPT 4 is no better at dealing with irony or sarcasm than the earlier versions. Someone is going to have to check its output very carefully before releasing it.

  7. tuckermorgan

    Just like powerpoint, other tools that actually created increased productivity per worker in the 90s-00s maybe LLMs will actually increase to productivity of people who can figure out how to work with it and become more technical in that way. Maybe not as many people doing that work now but probably not changing the fact that there still needs to be a person figuring out how to implement it for the next 10-15 years before the market/technology evolve again.

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