Arms Race

08/10/23 • 55 min

Everyone is talking about AI today. But this generative AI boom didn’t happen overnight. In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Vice President of Growth Marketing Alex Nazarevich welcome special guest Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Technology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Arun Sundararajan. Together, they’re exploring the history of the secret arms race that’s been raging in Silicon Valley for the past decade—and what might come next. Is there an end goal? What effect will deepfakes and other AI-generated content have on the coming election? How should marketers be adjusting their workflow to rise to the AI occasion? We’re answering these questions and more on this episode of Unprompted. So tune in to get caught up on the history of AI, and to prepare for what’s on the horizon.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Unbounce’s Vice President of Growth Marketing Alex Nazarevich. This episode also features Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Technology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Arun Sundararajan. Arun’s best-selling and award-winning book, “The Sharing Economy,” was published by the MIT Press in 2016. His research studies how digital technologies transform business, government and civil society. His current focus is on the future of capitalism, artificial intelligence and platform-enabled change, antitrust policy in tech, and the digital future of work. Arun has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils on Technology, Values and Policy and the New Economic Agenda. He is an advisor to numerous organizations and works with tech companies on issues of strategy, litigation and regulation.

Key Quotes

*”Yes, [AI is] technologically fascinating, but there's a very important need for human beings to pay attention to what has been created because it's not like it's coming from some preexisting source. It is actually being created on the fly.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”We are fundamentally changing through generative AI how we as humans get information...Generative AI is taking us into this uncharted territory where you have an expert on demand who is working it out for you on the fly and giving you that information. It's not like a search engine where it's giving you someone else's pre-created information. It's almost like a third form of getting information in a very fundamental way.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”People who are looking for [AI] to give you the exact answer are using it wrong. What we should be doing, at least in part with ChatGPT and with other large language model-based systems, is using them to come up with things that we might not have thought of, and then bring the humans into the loop to take the good ideas to completion.” - Arun Sundararajan

*“Today, we are not sharing music. We're sharing musicians. We're not downloading art, we're downloading artists. And so it's sort of a scary moment where we have to decide as human beings how much of our intelligence do we wanna claim for ourselves, and how much of it do we wanna just cede to this collective intelligence that is generative AI.” - Arun Sundararajan

*”Part of the reason why there's a lot of conversation around the need to slow down AI research and the risks of AI is that the race is happening without a clear objective...We don't know what the eventual use of these AI systems will be. Once there's a demonstration that the successor to generative AI can actually make a dent in curing incurable diseases, in developing new drugs, in addressing climate change, that's when the value of the innovation is going to become clearer.” - Arun Sundararajan

Time Stamps

[2:34] Introducing co-host Alex Nazarevich, Unbounce VP of Growth Marketing

[7:20] AI in the news: Llama 2 vs. AI-X

[12:23] Let’s explore the history of the AI arms race

[12:54] Meet Arun Sundararajan, NYU Professor at the Stern School of Business

[14:22] Learn about the history and evolution of AI

[21:35] How reliable is ChatGPT?

[25:14] Why wasn’t Google first to market with AI?

[26:38] What’s at stake in the AI arms race?

[30:53] Who has the best chance of pulling ahead in the arms race?

[36:48] What are the risks of unregulated AI?

[38:28] What will AI do to the human creative process?

[41:00] Should we be afraid AI will take over the world?

[48:05] Why are tech companies calling for regulation?

[49:40] How will AI affect the upcoming presidential election?

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley, CMO at Unbounce

Alex Nazarevich

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Key Quotes

Time Stamps

[2:34] Introducing co-host Alex Nazarevich, Unbounce VP of Growth Marketing

[7:20] AI in the news: Llama 2 vs. AI-X

[12:23] Let’s explore the history of the AI arms race

[12:54] Meet Arun Sundararajan, NYU Professor at the Stern School of Business

[14:22] Learn about the history and evolution of AI

[21:35] How reliable is ChatGPT?

[25:14] Why wasn’t Google first to market with AI?

[26:38] What’s at stake in the AI arms race?

[30:53] Who has the best chance of pulling ahead in the arms race?

[36:48] What are the risks of unregulated AI?

[38:28] What will AI do to the human creative process?

[41:00] Should we be afraid AI will take over the world?

[48:05] Why are tech companies calling for regulation?

[49:40] How will AI affect the upcoming presidential election?

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley, CMO at Unbounce

Alex Nazarevich

Previous Episode

Try AI

Just about everyone has heard of ChatGPT, Midjourney and Dall-E, but these just scratch the surface of all the wild and cool AI tools out there. So the Unbounce team has taken it upon themselves to review nearly 150 AI tools, and they are bringing you their recommendations for best in class. In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Garrett Hughes welcome special guest Saba El-Hilo as they review a plethora of AI tools and answer the questions: Would we use it? Do we see value in it? Or is it junk? Tune in to find out for yourself, and you might just walk away with your new favorite AI-powered marketing tool.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Unbounce’s Manager of Content Marketing Garrett Hughes. This episode also features special guest Saba El-Hilo. Saba is Unbounce’s SVP of Data & Engineering, and leads the company’s engineering and data teams. Saba’s career includes more than 10 years of experience building top performing and innovative products. She has deep experience working with Big Data, ML technologies and building web applications and services. Most recently, Saba was the Head of Data Platform at Mapbox where she built and led multiple teams responsible for producing data products from a user base of more than half a billion monthly active users. Saba’s ability to build performant and highly scalable systems, mentor engineers, and foster diverse and healthy engineering teams will help Unbounce deliver valuable products to its customers.

Key Quotes

*”Who am I sharing my data with? That's really important, because at the end of the day our huge value at Unbounce is on our data set. And every company is trending that way. So who am I giving my value to, and am I getting that value in return?” - Saba El-Hilo

*”This is like, ‘Are robots coming for your jobs?’ I feel like as a marketer, I could be more of a one man band if I had to be. And for smaller marketing teams where you wear many hats, some of these tools to me are just blowing my mind.” - Pete Housley

Time Stamps

[2:29] AI in the news: Congress works to regulate AI

[4:49] What are economists predicting the result of AI use on the job market will be?

[6:42] Introducing special guest Saba El-Hilo, SVP of Data and Engineering at Unbounce

[10:39] How is Unbounce leveraging AI tools?

[11:52] How is AI impacting developers?

[13:25] How does Saba evaluate new AI tools?

[14:47] Introducing today’s theme: Try AI. The team tries out new AI tools and gives us their honest review.

[16:34] Market Muse

[17:36] Any Word

[20:32] Synthesia

[22:33] Munch

[25:08] Wondercraft

[27:21] Soundraw

[28:59] Uizard

[33:32] Descript

[37:01] Lightning round of AI tool reviews

[38:48] What lessons did the team learn about new AI tools?

Links

Connect with...

Pete Housley

Faye Campbell

Breedon Grauer

Check out the AI tools we explored...

Copywriting/Content Marketing:

MarketMuse: AI analysis of content against the SERP.

Anyword: AI copy generator specifically built for “marketing” use cases.

Video Marketing:

Synthesia: AI-generated videos with human-like actors.

Munch: Cut long-form videos into social shareable snippets.

Design:

Uizard: Generate multi-screen mockups for websites, apps, and more from a text prompt.

Podcasting:

Wondercraft: Turn existing content into professional podcasts.

Music:

Soundraw: Instantly generate royalty-free music.

Influencer Marketing:

Affable.ai: “An AI companion for influencers.”

Social Media

Lately: An AI-powered social content generator.

ContentStudio: AI-generated text/images for social posting.

And more:

Otter: AI transcription that includes a AI-powered chatbot (to search and summarize the content).

Forms.a...

Next Episode

AI on Trial

There are lots of concerns with the development of AI—but do the negatives outweigh the benefits? In this episode, co-hosts Pete Housley and Unbounce Senior Creative Director James Thomson play judge with special guest Aaron Kwittken, Founder and CEO of PRophet. Together, they talk about all things AI ethics. Should agencies disclose that they use AI? Should they be paid based on time and materials or value of work? Can the government regulate AI? Tune in to this episode of Unprompted to learn about how you should - and shouldn’t - navigate the use of AI in the marketing world today.

Meet The Unprompted Crew

Pete Housley is host extraordinaire and CMO at Unbounce. His co-host this episode is Senior Creative Director at Unbounce, James Thomson. This episode also features Founder and CEO of PRophet, Aaron Kwittken. Aaron is a highly acclaimed industry leader, serial entrepreneur and seasoned corporate affairs and integrated communications strategist with more than 30 years in the PR industry. He is also CEO of the Comms Tech Unit for the Stagwell Marketing Cloud, a suite of AI SaaS solutions for PR, social media, and content creators. Aaron founded KWT Global in late 2005 (f/k/a Kwittken), a highly acclaimed global PR and brand strategy consultancy which was acquired by KWT Global and where he currently serves as Chairman. Aaron has received numerous honors and awards for his work and industry leadership from the likes of ICCO, Cannes LIONS, PR Week, The Drum and PRovoke Media, having recently been named a PRovoke 2021 Innovator 25 and to PR Week's 2022 Dashboard 25 for his comms-tech leadership and industry innovation.

Key Quotes

*”When I ran my agency day-to-day, I'd be like, ‘Can I hire someone who can get me 60, 70% of the way there?’ Right now, we're there [with AI.] We're at 60, 70%. And then the human has to come over the top to finish it, to make it better, to give it the values, judgment, and emotion that AI does not have.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”Humans still need to come up with the idea. Creativity rests with us. It's really more so figuring out who else is gonna be interested in that idea or that concept.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”The beauty of it to me is we might hire fewer people on the bottom, but they're going to have much better roles. They're going to stay longer. We're going to be able to upskill them. And instead of having less people, we're going to have people doing higher value things, potentially changing the compensation scheme as well. We agencies should not be paid for time and materials. We should be paid based on the value that we bring.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”ChatGPT is a toy. PRophet is a tool. And I tell folks, ‘If you want to play around with ChatGPT on your own, great. Do not put anything corporate or any work related stuff in ChatGPT, because you don't own that. In the same way that if you use Google Sheets and you don't have an SLA in place, you're giving up all of your information.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”AI is not biased. Humans are biased. And humans build algorithms that then power AI. AI isn’t really AI, it's really human intelligence. So AI is only going to be as biased as the humans who built it. So then you need to have countermeasures and algorithms that then search for and identify biases inside of each platform, which takes time and it takes investment.” - Aaron Kwittken

*”You can't wait on the government. Put it this way: The government has had no control over social media platforms and that's caused all sorts of mayhem, despair, and death in the world. And we can go on and on about how reckless Facebook, Instagram, TikTok have been. The government has had no control over that. What makes us think that the government can control AI? There's no way. We have to do it ourselves.” - Aaron Kwittken

Time Stamps

[1:44] Introducing James Thomson, Senior Creative Director at Unbounce

[6:00] AI in the news: Does Hillary Clinton endorse Ron DeSantis? [Hint: Deepfake]

[9:10] WormGPT and FraudGPT enable phishing attempts

[13:05] What is bias in AI marketing?

[15:53] AI goes on Trial

[16:25] Introducing guest Aaron Kwittken, Founder & CEO at PRophet

[21:03] How does PRophet apply AI to PR?

[23:47] Does PRophet generate ideas? Or do humans need to?

[24:42] Who should be using PRophet?

[30:15] Could AI replace the PR employee?

[35:35] How will AI affect the PR industry going forward?