Recent months have painted a fearful picture of artificial intelligence and its potential to replace marketing professionals. The truth is, artificial intelligence has always been a boon to digital marketers—from ad placements, to Search Engine Optimization, to analytics. Similar to these other tools, generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI for short, create similar opportunities. Instead of streamlining the process of list segmentation, GenAI is helping to streamline content creation.
Like any other tool, GenAI performs best when wielded by someone who knows and understands how to use it. In this article, we’ll explore how GenAI can be used to enhance your existing efforts so you can upgrade your strategy.
Suggested GenAI Services and Their Benefits
Assistance with General Communication
One of the most common advantages of GenAI is its ability to check grammar and spelling. In fact, you probably don’t realize that spelling and grammar checkers are a function of GenAI. Microsoft Word, Google Chrome, your mobile device’s keyboard, and others all have this function built in.
For organizations looking for a bit more oomph in this regard, Grammarly hooks up to just about any software and uses GenAI to help strengthen sentences, suggest alternative phrasing, and generally improve written communication for everyone who uses it.
Assistance with Content Generation
The ability for GenAI to create marketing content has been making national headlines for almost a year at this point. The most newsworthy service is Chat-GPT, but others like Claude and Bard are capable of the same function: creating content based on a prompt. Text generators combine deep learning techniques with generative algorithms to create just about anything that requires text: blog and social media posts, web page copy, headlines, product descriptions, presentations, even meta descriptions and page titles.
Perhaps a lesser known function of these engines is as idea generators. If you are stumped on additional keywords to add to a web page, text generators can generate a list of ideas to get you out of the rut.
On the image front, there are plenty of engines that can generate images based on a text prompt combined with other options such as art style and aspect ratio. DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Adobe Firefly are all available to the public and capable of creating striking images that can be used for some types of marketing graphics such as logos, social media graphics, stock photos and more.
Not everything generated by AI can be used for commercial purposes, so check your preferred engine to make sure that you can use your images for your intended purpose. For instance, Getty Images has its own GenAI engine that can be used for commercial use.
Assistance with Customer Service
Another service that has been seen for years are chatbots. Chatbots are high-functioning robots that use decision trees and generative algorithms to assist customers with routine and/or simple interactions. Things like answering questions and updating account information are straightforward examples of what chatbots can do, but that is not all they are capable of. For instance, the chatbot for Domino’s pizza can take your pizza order without navigating the confusing online ordering system.
If your organization is looking for a chatbot, Ultimate is a powerful chatbot that uses the same technology behind ChatGPT and integrates with a wide range of customer service suites. If there is a specific function you’d like the chatbot to perform, there are plenty of ways to customize it to suit your organization.
What to Watch Out for with AI
It’s important to keep in mind that, like humans, GenAI is only as good as the dataset they are working with (or in the humans’ case, the knowledge that they have). A chatbot with out-of-date information in its system is going to provide out-of-date information when prompted. Make sure that the dataset behind your desired GenAI engine is accurate and being processed correctly.
Particularly with generative engines like ChatGPT, Bard and Adobe Firefly, it’s important to fact check all output before giving final approval. For image generators, human figures are bound to be disfigured in minute ways that are only noticed on a closer inspection; writing generators are known for making up facts and using imaginary citations. The best way around this is to have a human identify what is wrong and how to fix it.
After all that, there is still the issue of intellectual property, which is a complicated subject. US courts are still deciding what constitutes as a copyright infringement—does scraping unlicensed copyrighted text or images for a dataset count as a violation? What happens when GenAI produces something with a similar likeness as a copyrighted image? How current copyright laws should be applied to GenAI is still up in the air, though a decision in August 2023 ruled that works created with GenAI cannot be copyrighted. Businesses should pay attention to GenAI and the law if they want to avoid any legal trouble in the future.
Like any service, adopting GenAI into your workflow will require forethought into whether its use would be beneficial to your organization. If you need to check in with an expert, Greenleaf Media is here help! Give us a call at 608.240.9611 or email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to see which generative AI services would be right for your organization.