Issue #5: Insane creative uses for ChatGPT, text-to-video breakthrough, Amazon’s AI partnership, and funding

Good morning,

Bing was put in timeout.

And like a teenager being gradually regifted their freedom after misbehaving, Microsoft has started to increase the limits on what Bing’s chatbot “Sydney” can do.

The company has announced an increase in the number of questions users can ask Bing from 50 to 60 per day, and 6 per chat session. A company blog post says the move is in response to user demand for longer conversations.

Microsoft dangled the carrot of another increase to 100 total chats per day soon. They say they are also testing a filtering option for the type of response users get to their prompts: precise, balanced or creative.

Meanwhile, Amazon is keen not to be left behind in the AI revolution. Its cloud unit (AWS) is expanding a partnership with AI startup Hugging Face, Inc., which is creating a rival to ChatGPT.

This means Hugging Face’s products will be made available to cloud customers by Amazon Web Services to use in developing their own applications.

More than 100,000 customers are running AI applications in the AWS cloud. They will now have access to Hugging Face AI tools. Get ready for another influx of innovation and invention.

And while some people are still marveling at the AI-created explainer videos showing an avatar reading a script, Google has taken AI video creation to another level.

Researchers have created a model that can produce moving video footage synthesized purely from a series of text prompts. While the results won’t be threatening Hollywood anytime soon, the computational challenges of this make it an impressive achievement. See the videos and prompts for yourself here.

Time to discover how you can push the frontiers of AI marketing in your own work.

In today’s issue:

• Discover how much of an effect AI-generated content will have on your Google rankings.

• Choose Your Own Adventure: will it be “happily ever after” for Amazon?

• The tiny European country trailblazing the way for AI research.

• Time to say goodbye to that Grammarly subscription? DeepL’s threateningly good latest release.

• The diverse and unique uses being unlocked for ChatGPT. In the words of The Bard (not to be confused with Bard), “...let me count the ways…”.

Let’s dive in.

BIONIC JUICE

When it comes to AI, good input = good output. Great prompts make the difference between thinking AI only produces poor content and being wowed by its capabilities.

The team at ghacks have released a ChatGPT prompt guide that covers:

• Capturing your customers: Find the sweet spot for your advertising efforts.

• Competition research: Do some digging on your competition and discover how you can stand out.

• Generating effective SEO: Make sure people can find you with effective keywords.

• Making a top-notch landing page: Compelling language specific to your product and industry to keep your prospects reading.

The list is directed toward GoogleAds, but the techniques could be just as effective for social media, brand, direct response or video campaigns.

Meanwhile, if you’re struggling with poor conversion rates and visitors are bouncing off your site, it might be high time to consider optimizing your landing page.

The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Optimization is a comprehensive collection of case studies and real-life examples to show you the most effective ways of capturing the attention of your website visitors.

It even includes a checklist at the end to make sure you don’t miss a trick.

LATEST DISCOVERIES

If you’re of a certain age, you might remember reading the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. All the fun of creating a new storyline based on the choices you made as you turned the pages.

Well, now Amazon has produced “Alexa Create” - a children’s storytelling feature based on generative AI.

Children and parents can pick a character, a color, a theme, and a descriptive word, and then the AI produces stories, including visuals, audio and background music.

Amazon is keen to reassure parents about the safety of this feature, saying it has “three safeguards in place”.

Used in a mindful way, it could be as much of a spark for creativity in children as ChatGPT can be for adults.

And bedtime stories are just the tip of the iceberg in the AI Revolution.

Google released a breakdown of AI and its involvement in the Google Suite showing how AI is already embedded into our lives in ways we have perhaps taken for granted.

They were pioneers in developing NLP (natural language processing), which was optimized specifically for Google Home’s Assistant AI.

Combine that with machine learning and you get an electronic personal assistant that can play music and set timers in the kitchen, generate ideas and research information in the office, and create personalized jokes in the living room.

Following controversy regarding CNET’s fact-checking reliability, they’ve realigned their strategy and decided to stop publishing AI-generated stories “for now”.

The Washington Post went as far as to call it a journalistic disaster.

Bankrate, a CNET derivative, was also using an AI for tedious topics. They’ve likewise slammed the brakes on AI-generated content.

But before they did, Sistrix released an in-depth analysis of Bankrate’s Google rankings since their move to AI-generated content.

Unlike CNET, the content ranked well on Google. This is in stark contrast to Alphabet’s usual anti-AI attitude.

Just a day later, Google clarified their AI policies on Twitter. The Google SearchLiason team stated that AI-generated content is not an issue as long as it's created for people.

With everything so fast-moving, it can be tricky to navigate the often-changing policies and apply them for yourself and your clients.

In an interview with Insider Intelligence, SEO specialist and Organic Growth director, Lily Ray, shared her advice on how to navigate Google’s constantly changing opinion:

"Don't do anything drastic". 

The inconsistencies between Bankrate and CNET's content are a clear example of the issue when marketers rely too heavily on AI.

Focus on creating your content for people, whatever tools you use.

As marketers, we pride ourselves on being wordsmiths and linguaphiles. Use AI to augment your skills and expertise, not to replace them.

Funding:

$30M: Enterprise platform Mad Street Den is bringing AI to the retail sector. The catch-all approach tracks stock, generates models, offers style suggestions and writes titles and descriptions for individual items.

$27M: Robust AI, a robotics solutions company for logistics and manufacturing, aims to make robotics more intuitive, helpful and streamlined. Dutch Research Council funding will support further AI research in the Netherlands.

$25M: aiOla's AI-powered technology uses advanced voice and image recognition to automate and digitize processes in food and animal safety inspections. With their latest funding, they plan to expand into the pharmaceutical industry.

BIONIC TOOLKIT

Time for you to roll up your cyber-sleeves and get stuck in. Check out these intuitive AI solutions designed to make your life easier.

🤖 AI writing assistants can pick up a whole string of tedious content writing tasks, such as scrutinizing documents for passive voice, grammatical errors and repetitiveness.

DeepL Write uses neural machine AI to perfect your writing in seconds. It specializes in fine-tuning prose instead of rewriting entire sentences from scratch.

• Available in German, British and American English, with more languages coming.

• Offers contextual grammar, punctuation and synonym suggestions.

• Optimizes for tone, style and phrasing.

• It’s totally free!

🤖 With Twitter dominating the headlines, it might be time to amp up your micro feed output.

Tweetmonk is an AI-powered Twitter tool that helps you automate and grow your accounts.

Users can write and schedule tweets and threads, generate relevant hashtags, and use one-click scheduling to boost their content. The super user-friendly interface doesn’t hurt, either.

Using pattern analysis, the app tracks the best times to post, how content measures up against previous Tweets and what specifically boosts your growth.

🤖 Since we’re tweeting—why not go the extra step, and give your account a finishing touch?

TwitterBio is a totally free, lightning-quick tool that generates a funny, casual or professional bio in seconds. We put it to the test for a hypothetical Bionic Marketing Twitter account:

“I'm a marketing expert and AI enthusiast. My newsletter brings you the latest news and trends in bionic marketing.”

(And while that Twitter account is fictitious, this one is not, and you might just find some AI marketing gold in there.)

THE LAST BYTE

People are finding all sorts of unique uses for ChatGPT. 

Restaurant review responses, industry-specific Twitter threads, fitness routines, book outlines, and even dating app message suggestions.

Someone even used a couple of AI tools in combination with one another to design a unique table.

For those who need it, this is evidence that AI is not destroying creativity.

It provides a fertile ground for nurturing inventiveness, imagination and ideation.

It is ending mediocrity, not creativity.

See you next week,
Sam Woods
Editor