Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, all at once. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 triggered a wave of product announcements which shows no sign of stopping. This was accompanied by open letters, writer strikes, and extinction warnings. It’s a lot to take in.
One thing is clear. AI is not going away and as creative people, we need to use it with intelligence, build good things on top of it, and make sure our empathy and creativity always lead the way.
As an agency, we advise our clients to focus more then ever on creating high quality content. Content that shows how their brand or business should be perceived. Content they can use to train their own AI about things like their style, tone and voice.
At Ebow we work daily with images, text and code, the building blocks that generative AIs like ChatGPT, Midjourney and DALL-E are trained on. So we asked some of our team if they are using AI and their thoughts on the future.
It turns out AI is proving helpful and fun at some base levels. From simplifying complex ideas, offering new ways of searching, idea generation and text editing for clarity, it’s got lots of potential, but as Aileen says, always be polite!
Kieron Farrell
Creative Director
The reckless optimist
How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?
Sometimes I’ll ask ChatGPT to suggest starting points for text that I have to write or to come up with general ideas which I will then refine. MidJourney looks very interesting. I’ve yet to subscribe but definitely want to experiment with that at some point.
How do you think it will affect the way you work?
I think it will revolutionise many industries including my own. I see it as cutting out the “grunt work” and allowing designers to actually design things (as opposed to clipping out images for example). So, like I said: Optimistic.
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
I think it will have unimaginable and unpredictable effects on the vast majority of companies. I couldn’t even guess how it might affect a company like Ebow but I’m excited to find out.
What is it about AI that you are most positive and negative about?
The potential supercharging of scientific progress.
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
The information environment is about to become so polluted that, unless we figure out ways to combat it, it will be extremely difficult to differentiate fact from fiction.
Glauco Russo
Senior Front-end Developer
The enthusiast
How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?
As an alternative to search using Google.
How do you think it will affect the way you work?
AI offers me the advantage of receiving detailed explanations for complex concepts, presenting a convenient alternative to traditional internet searches. In addition, AI-powered automation can be a powerful tool that is useful for a variety of tasks, increasing efficiency and productivity.
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
The combination of AI-powered automation and access to extensive knowledge resources is a positive factor for company growth and team agility.
What is it about AI that you are most positive about?
The source of knowledge and easy access to information are significant advantages.
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
I fear that AI’s efficiency in certain contexts could lead to the replacement of many professionals if those contexts expand.
Nikki Holmes
Account Director and SLT
Cautiously optimistic
How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?
I can be rather talkative – both IRL and in my online comms! – so I have found AI to be quite good at helping me cull and distill overly lengthy information into easy to digest, impactful content.
How do you think it will affect the way you work?
I’m cautiously optimistic and think there is real scope for AI to make certain aspects of my job easier, especially more admin / day-to-day tasks. I can use AI to get the ball rolling and provide a basic foundation that I can then build upon myself.
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
There will be a period of uncertainty and exploration ahead, which could result in our outputs as a human team being compared more to AI, such as “I could’ve come up with that myself with ChatGPT in 5-minutes!”
However, for me AI is not a replacement for us. It is another tool that we can use to enhance our own creativity, skills and expertise. I think the best response for agencies out there is to continue to produce high-quality work as normal, and just keep one eye on how things progress and develop.
What is it about AI that you are most positive about?
The potential. We are only scratching the surface of this subject, and I believe that we could achieve amazing things in the future that we haven’t even considered right now. The opportunities and improvements could be endless.
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
The potential! Skynet, anyone?!
Aileen Bowe
SEO Manager
Curious
How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?
I use it to troubleshoot issues, ask complex questions, write first drafts of content, help with small coding questions or tasks, generate ideas, present things in an alternative way, and carry out non-cerebral work. I also test its abilities and explore how it can work with other tools, e.g., Sheets.
Also, I think it’s important to be polite to AI systems! I usually always say please, thank you, and praise it when it works well.
It’s important to point out that there is a learning curve with it and the more you practise using it, the better you get at learning good command prompts. There are hundreds of articles being written on it every day, so it’s good to keep up to date on what other people are doing with it.
How do you think it will affect the way you work?
It’s like having a 0.25 person with you to carry out additional tasks that would otherwise take a lot longer. When you need to generate ideas, the way that it collates ideas from across the web in such a concise way, it actually ends up giving you more ideas, or better ways to do things. It’s a cliche, but you do get the sense you’re standing on the shoulders of giants
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
Every job comes with admin work. Although it’s necessary work, it can, to a greater or lesser extent, take time away from the core, valuable work that you do. I think that AI has an incredible potential to create efficiencies and free up everyone to do more cerebral, creative, or core work that clients really care about
What is it about AI that you are most positive about?
Google revolutionised rapid access to information .We’ve had around 30 years of this information building up on the web. AI is the inevitable result of this vast amount of data being repurposed into new and innovative ways. We can’t envision right now where it will end up, but the history of tech developments shows us that there will be a rapid growth period of research, inventions, and impossible-to-envision capabilities. Lots to be excited about!
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
The environmental concerns.
Peter Meynes
Front-end Developer
Curious
How do you think AI will affect the way you work?
Subtasks could probably be dedicated to it soon, as far as I see – even with having to edit the result, it could save time.
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
The team? No idea. Perhaps we’ll send our AI clones to Zoom meetings and sleep instead – until the AI notices no real person showed up and fires everyone.
What is it about AI that you are most positive about?
In theory, it could improve life in general, e.g.
AI already outperforms experts in evaluating scans to detect cancer in early stages.
It could find the most efficient way to do something, e.g. flight plans to save fuel or organising road traffic.
Tedious, repetitive processes could be outsourced, freeing up time and energy for creative tasks.
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
AI-generated content not marked as such, for example watching a review on YouTube the other day, it took me a couple of minutes to realise it was probably both written and read out by AI.
Hania Masood
Account Manager
Cautious
How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?
I sometimes use it to get a different angle when writing something, or when I need a fresh perspective.
How do you think it will affect the way you work?
It might help me get new ideas when I’ve hit a mental block, but too much dependency on it might kill creativity.
How do you think it will affect what we do in Ebow as a team?
On an organizational level – I don’t think it has an effect. On an individual level, it can help us in our day-to-day work if we use it effectively.
What is it about AI that you are most positive about?
It can do the grunt work for you, saving time for tasks that require brain power.
What is it about AI that you are most negative about?
It can make people complacent. There’s no fact-checking involved. If used regularly and widely, there will come a time when all digital content will be homogenous.
We’ll leave the last word to Hania:
“In short, if the stakes are low, there’s no harm in using AI all you want – it does make your life way easier. But when you want accountability, human review, and genuinely original content, you might want to resort to the OG way of using your brain. As Pippin from LOTR said “Shortcuts make for long delays”.