AI round-up: Week of Feb. 5, 2024
First, welcome to any new readers we have as a result of the PRSA Cleveland event my colleague Dillan Kanya and I presented on Feb. 8. As an old school PR purist who came through the legendary PRKent program … getting to kick-off their year was a personal thrill.
Second, well, let’s start off by blowing your mind. Ethan Mollick posted a blog titled Magic for English Majors. The gist, from my perspective, is that we are only using a fraction of what generative AI can really do – in other words, using it to create and learn based on things we already know. But how do we use it to learn and grow based on things we don’t know … or know it can do?
The answer, kinda, is in the blog. Here’s his tease, from LinkedIn:
“Prompt engineering is a bad name as it implies both that prompting AI is well-understood & deterministic (engineering) and that it should be done by STEM folks (engineers).
Prompting may be programming, of a sort, but it can also be thought of as teaching or managing the LLM. And the humanities can help you be a better prompter, as I wrote about before.”
The blog is worth the read, if only to cleanse your pallete of the thinking there’s a right and a wrong way to interact with LLMs.
No one said it would be easy to get a beat on all of this. (But I wish they had.)
This week’s issue: 8 stories (counting Ethan Mollick’s)
The AI impact meter: Moderate
How long to read: 20 minutes
1. Breaking: Bard … we hardly knew ya. Gemini is here!
2. A $25M (Deep)Fake out. As we’ve been talking about, it is time to make sure your crisis and cyber communications programs are up to date to reflect new technology and new technology threats.
3. Why I switched from Google to Perplexity. Hot topic, coming through. It’s been boiling for a bit, but I think it’s hit a point where we need to have it on our radar. I’m going to experiment with this…will keep you posted.
4. I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. AI. The Washington Post tested out three AI headshot tools. The results are in.
5. ChatGPT will tag images generated in Dall-E3 to battle misinformation. Hey, it’s a start.
6. ChatGPT was notified by Italy that it violated Europe’s GDPR.
7. Christopher Penn nails it. A friendly reminder that if you’re not taking a fresh look at your brand voice, position or your own personal brand, you are missing a golden opportunity. In the age of abundance, what is scarce? Start your brand story there.
I loved this quote from the blog:
“Trust is scarce. Because of competing interests and an alarmist media environment where everything has to be amped up to 11 just to earn a few clicks, people don't trust nearly as much as they used to. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer highlights that we don't trust... well, most anything.”
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share!
-Ben
As a reminder, this is a round-up of the biggest stories, often hitting multiple newsletters I receive/review. The sources are many … which I’m happy to read on your behalf. Let me know if there’s one you’d like me to track or have questions about a topic you’re not seeing here.