The Need to Know on AI-Generated Content

If you’ve spent any time on social media or the internet at large lately, you’ve seen AI (artificial intelligence) has become a hot topic. Services like ChatGPT and DALL-E2 and their AI generated content have been featured in countless articles and posts. These conversations aren’t about a malicious AI like Skynet, HAL 9000, the Cylons, or Ultron of science fiction. Instead, these AI are learning programs currently in development that have become capable of generating creative content like images, art, and text. Naturally, this has created a lot of discussion about the capabilities, uses, and ethics of these kinds of programs. Rosewood Marketing is here to help you get caught up with everything you need to know about AI-generated content.

What is AI?

Let’s start with the basic: what is AI? AI in science fiction has typically referred to fully sentient artificial beings, usually computers, androids, or robots. These are not the AI were dealing with in reality… yet. Instead, AI currently refers to programs that use machine learning to more effectively complete tasks. These programs “learn” by running training data through algorithms to learn concepts and associations. They then make decisions or predictions without needing direct programming. These algorithms are now used in numerous places such as search engines, photo editing, web design, recommendation systems, language translation, chatbots, and far more. The technology has proved vital in being able to parse the massive amount of data now available on the internet. 

The Need to Know on AGI (Artificial Generative Intelligence)

Most major tech companies currently have their own AI development projects and divisions, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, etc. These are for various applications, most of which are primarily still for backend services. Typically, users don’t directly engage with or realize they are using AI programs. 

Generative AI, however, are ones the wider public has more actively interacted with lately and are responsible for the wave of AI generated content. These AIs are designed to generate visual, audio, or textual content based on user inputs. OpenAI is currently one of the recognized industry leaders in developing generative AIs. They’re responsible for both ChatGPT and DALL-E2, whose respective text and image generations have been all over the internet lately. OpenAI’s technology has also been used in partnership by Microsoft, who is currently using it for developing a “new Bing.” Nor is OpenAI alone. Midjourney is another major image generating AI that has become popular.

These programs accept textual prompts or commands and then generate content in response. Overall, the current general interest comes from both programs’ adequate ability to fulfill those requests. The sudden popularity is the result of OpenAI and other services recently making the programs available to the public. ChatGPT is currently free to use for its research and development, while Dall-E2 and Midjourney comes with a set of free uses with more available for purchase. 

Benefits of AI Generated Content

The benefits of AI generated content are immediately clear. With simple prompts users can create full pieces of text, lines of programming code, a sound bite of a person’s voice saying a specific phrase, or custom visual art faster than a human could ever produce and without that effort. The sudden impact of AI generated content is because of its immediately impressive ability to generate content from simple commands. These AI can greatly benefit content creation by speeding up the process and reducing human workload. Imagine being able to just give the prompt “Write a blog telling me everything I need to know about AI generated content” and getting a full article like this in a few seconds.

Drawbacks of AI Generated Content

That, at least, is the ideal. A lot of work needs to be done before AI generated content, replaces human creators, if ever. It is true that the creations of generative AI are already staggeringly impressive. While these AI are quite capable at creating certain kinds of art or texts, they immediately falter at more complex tasks. AI generations of humans have become infamous for their monstrous hands. CNET had recently used AI to write its articles, but after a review found more than half of those articles had serious errors, they paused further use. AI can only generate content as well as they have been trained, and right now AI generation remains at a stage that is an advanced technological parrot. It’s ability to create is impressive, but it does not actually “know” what it’s doing.

Where will AI generated content go?

Currently AI generated content isn’t quite up to par with human creativity and expertise. For simple tasks, however, AI are already producing staggering results. Along with the need for additional development, there are also current ethical concerns and debates about these generative AI. They have been trained on a wide set of creations by artists who did not give explicit permission for this machine training. As a result, AI generated content has raised debates about whether these programs are stealing from other human creators. That has only become more complicated with concerns that these AI will replace human artists and creators. 

On the other hand, AI generated content can be a powerful creative tool. Artists have been using generative AI in their work for decades, such as Harold Cohen’s AARON. Ultimately, creators and industries will adapt to how AI generated content develops and can be most effectively used. It’s a powerful tool, and just like any new tool, it needs to settle into its appropriate uses. If you’re interested in current AI applications for your business’ website, check out this blog and contact our web design team. You can also discuss with Rosewood’s marketing team about the current uses of AI generated content in marketing.